‘Nobody has a choice about when they discover the world’s harsher realities, Mrs Fleming,’ he fired back with a barely suppressed anger. ‘And Alexis discovered them a lot older than …’ he sighed, swallowing something, shaking his head, labouring to calm himself. ‘A lot older than some,’ he finished quietly, this time with real sorrow in his voice.
Jane looked at him, kept her eyes trained so that he knew he couldn’t hide from her gaze no matter how long he stared at his empty plate.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked softly.
He said nothing, but regained that iron countenance. The shutters were up.
‘We’ve talked all evening about where everyone else came from, but what about you? How did you get here?’
‘Military Intelligence.’
‘Which country’s?’
‘More than one.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Lots of different places.’
Jane nodded. It was going to be like this, was it? Good practice, perhaps. Get anything out of him and tapping the weapons hawkers would be a doddle.
‘Originally. Childhood.’
‘A small town. Just an ordinary small town. The name is on the front gate.’
‘Rla an Tir?’ Jane asked. He smiled at her pronunciation. ‘Where is it?’
‘By a river.’
Jane sighed, loudly communicating her exasperation, though she knew it signalled acceptance of defeat.
‘What is it you’re afraid of?’
‘In my experience, the more people know about you, the more ways they can find to hurt you. I’ve made a lot of enemies.’
‘And so that means you can’t afford to make any friends? Nobody gets in, do they? Into your sanctuary. I don’t even know your first name.‘
Neither she nor Bett spoke for a few moments, both of them simultaneously reaching for their glasses, as though otherwise occupying their mouths would excuse or disguise the absence of conversation. Jane’s silence was a stubborn one as she was feeling there was nothing left she could say and that the ball was in his court anyway. Bett’s seemed more reflective, as though she had at least given him something to think about.
Covering the gap, but accentuating the awkwardness, Marie-Patrice returned at this point to take away their plates. They thanked her heartily, but were once again left with their impasse after she had departed to fetch dessert. They sat for a few more wordless moments and then Bett finally spoke.
‘It’s Hilary,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘My first name. It’s Hilary. And if you tell anybody, I’ll have no choice but to kill you.’
A tale of a tub
Another few days of this and Ross would have to start checking himself for barnacles. The longest he’d ever spent on a boat before had been about an hour on the pond at Rouken Glen with his mates, and the longest he’d spent on a boat with his dad had been half that, on a pedalo in Lanzarote when he was about eleven and their relationship was, to put it politely, less problematic. He wasn’t sure how much more he could take. The only upside was that it made his need to escape all the more imperative, if that was at all possible. So far, escape itself most definitely wasn’t.
It was what, six days now? Five? Seven? He was starting to lose track. Certainly enough time for his dad to have muttered, ‘Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,’ at least a couple of thousand times. He probably wasn’t even aware he was saying it, or at least not aware that he had said it again and again and again and again just about every time there was a lull in conversation long enough to have a look over the gunwales or through a window.
Not that Ross didn’t have his own unconscious verbal tick, right enough. He couldn’t remember when it had started, but he was aware that he was constantly singing snatches of Friggin’ in the Riggin‘, and this awareness was not proving the first stage towards cessation. All the bloody time, in his head, under his breath; whenever he wasn’t talking or following a sufficiently engaging train of thought, there it was.
Give it some bollocks! Indeed.
It was a big yacht, its size and opulence a constant reminder of the stakes being played for and the resources at the enemy’s disposal. It had to be at least a hundred feet long, and maybe thirty tall from the flybridge to the waterline. Price, he knew too little to gauge; two million, five, ten? However, the longer Ross spent on it, the smaller it got. It may have dwarfed the vessel they were ferried to it aboard, but it was still a confined space, a limited environment hemmed in by – thank you, Dad – water, water everywhere. Ross walked the decks constantly, round in circles and figures of eight, each fixture, each polished rail, the tesselation of the wooden floor becoming more familiar, the spaces between them shorter. He climbed the stairs between decks to give his routes the variation of a third dimension: sometimes taking in the saloon bridge on his way to the main helm, other times the galley, until he had surely exhausted every configuration. For some reason, he often felt compelled to keep moving, perhaps because most of the time the boat wasn’t.
There was no actual rigging and, unlike in the song, there was far from fuck-all else to do. There was the big plasma screen and a wide selection of DVDs, plus the satellite telly option, the free drink and a passable library, the owner’s tastes – or at least the tastes he wished to project – tending towards the classics. The boat was built and equipped for pleasure and for hospitality, not as some modern-day prison hulk. However, the pleasure and hospitality properties were nonetheless being deployed to make its prison hulk role more securely effective. Idle hands, and all that. Captives with, ahem, truly fuck-all else to do would more diligently turn their minds and energies towards escape.
That was why Ross preferred to walk the decks. That and to get away from his dad, who was steadily doing his head in with his apologetic sincerity and ceaseless underlining that ‘at least we’re getting to spend some time together’ – even if it seemed Dad would gladly spend most of it stretched out in the saloon bridge watching Sky Sports, like he’d never left home.
He had been a good dad when Ross was a wee boy: attentive, calm, playful, dutiful, reassuring, all the things wee boys need their dads to be. He wasn’t one of those fathers whose kids might sketch a picture of a newspaper with feet sticking out if they were asked to draw a portrait of him. He always had time for Ross and Michelle, time and patience. It was only on Sundays that there was ever tension.
Sunday. Mass day. He and Michelle never wanted to go. Kids, huh? Who can figure their funny little minds, that they’d not want to go along to a laugh-riot like that of a weekend morning? It was always a struggle, always a fight, huffs, anger, shouting, tears, threats, sighing and tension, tension, tension. Not just between Dad and the kids, either, but between him and Mum too. Ross didn’t understand it at the time, just thought that Dad was in a bad mood with everyone, but looking back it was easy to see where the pressure was coming from. It was the one time in the week when she wasn’t being the dutiful wife he needed. Oh, sure, she’d play her part in the chivvying along, the dressing of reluctant weans, promises of a big fry-up awaiting when they got home, the physical bundling into the car, but then she would be heading back through the front door. After that, he was on his own, dragging the weans into the chapel where he’d be conspicuous as the only father there unaccompanied by his living wife, because she was, you know, one of them.
None of them knew it at the time, but those aggro-ridden Sundays were merely the early marker-buoys denoting the collision course they were rigidly set upon, when those kids, who he had brought up to be smart and enquiring, began supporting their reluctance by asking awkward questions. An early one Ross remembered was: If it’s a Mortal Sin not to go to Mass, and a Mortal Sin means you’ll go to Hell if you die without it being absolved at Confession, then doesn’t that mean Mummy will go to Hell, as she’s never been to Mass or Confession?
The answer, if it could be called that, was Ross’s formal introduction to the Roman
Catholic Church’s theological goalpost-mobilisation technique, a system of pseudo-logic and undefined terms that prevented any argument taking a foothold in anything so base or vulgar as fact, reason or consistency. For Ross, scientifically evidence-minded from a precociously early age, this was never good enough, always resulting in a tenacious pursuit of the issue that ended, familiarly, with his dad losing the place, outraged and offended by his son’s temerity in questioning these matters at all. That truly was the thing Ross couldn’t relate to, and the reason Dad couldn’t relate to Ross: he was so unquestioningly accepting of the way things were. He liked sitting in his armchair, flipping channels. He liked having the same boring stuff for dinner all the time. He liked routine. He liked order and paradigms.
Dad was a boring old fart, and Ross had just been too small to notice at the time that Dad had been a boring young fart, too.
‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ ‘I know what I like and I like what I know.’ Two of his most-used phrases.
Water, water all around …
There were also eyes all around. Ross was being watched, not invasively, but constantly. He and Dad had freedom to roam the decks, but he seldom found himself in a spot where at least one guard didn’t have line-of-sight. They stood off, almost respectfully, keeping their distance and not attempting to be ostensibly intimidating, but their presence was for all that even harder to miss. The only place where nobody was looking at him was in his cabin, which made him think that it might actually be the place where he was being monitored closest. He hadn’t found a camera yet, but he feared trouble if he was caught looking too hard, and there were plenty of places – ventilation grates, built-in speaker panels, mirrors, smoke alarm/sprinkler units – where such a device might be concealed. There could be audio bugs too, though Ross had his doubts about that. For one, he hadn’t noticed any of the guards looking soul-crushingly bored, as would surely single out the poor bastard whose job it was to monitor the less-than-riveting content of his and Dad’s conversations. For another, nobody had come looking for the lip-balm tube he’d given Dad on the night they did talk about something worth listening to.
As well as being unobtrusive, the guards were also coolly polite, in varying competencies of English. This had further encouraged his dad’s slide into slothful embrace of their situation’s silver lining – we’re sailing for hell, but we’re sailing there first class – but to Ross it was the opposite of reassuring. Simmering menace and casual brutality would have marked them out as mere thugs and hard-cases, whereas these guys were controlled, utterly disciplined professionals. They wouldn’t be easily manipulated, panicked or misled. They couldn’t be played off against each other or tempted into self-seeking errors of judgement. And cool as their politeness might be, their execution of harsher commands would be far colder.
Their boss was seldom to be seen, and definitely not to be approached. On the rare occasions Ross had spotted him on one of the outer decks or other more public areas, there was always a guard blocking the path, saying nothing but making it plain that visitors would not be made welcome. Consequently, the bloke hadn’t said a word to him since their first meeting, which Ross had found odd, not because he imagined himself a fascinating conversationalist, but because he assumed the guy would want to pick his brains about the project. He also, Ross would have to confess, expected him to lord it over his captives a little, maybe engage in a bit of Bond-villain moral-philosophical discourse. But no. To this arrogant motherfucker, Ross was just cargo, a commodity to be bought and sold. He’d no sooner pop by for a blether than talk to a crate of munitions down in the hold.
This business was full of people just like that. They might talk about defence, they might posture about developing technology, but they were just about the money. Even doddery old Willis, for all his solicitous attempts to appear interested, struggling manfully to at least look like he was following Ross’s explanations, didn’t really care. None of them did: not about how it worked, not about what would be done with it, not about the people who’d be killed by it, not about the wars that would be fought with it. Just the money. It wasn’t the arms trade, it wasn’t the arms industry. It was the arms business, and don’t ever forget it. A business where blood was money, and to buy a boat like this from it meant enough had been spilled to float the fucking thing.
Ross climbed to the fly-bridge and had a look around. That he was allowed up there was advance notice that there’d be nothing to see, as it was off-limits at times when they were in sight of land. The boat had put in somewhere that morning, or close to: they had halted outside a harbour and someone had gone ashore in the speed launch that was usually cradled above the lower transom-deck platform – always, always, seriously off-limits – at the stern, next to the jet skis and an outboard-fitted dinghy. By process of elimination, he deduced that it had been the boss and two guards. Ross’s picture had been taken on a digital camera before they left, of him holding a print-out from the online edition of Le Monde to verify the date. Proof of life, they called it. Proof also that time was running out. He and Dad had been ordered to their cabins for the duration, only allowed above decks once they were well on their way out to sea again. He’d seen land for the first time in days through his cabin’s small window, but had no idea where they were. Just some Mediterranean port: leisure rather than industrial; lots of jetties, rows of yachts.
Right now, however, there was nothing to see. Just water, water … The most effective component of his imprisonment encircled him as far as his eyes could see. To the stern he could just make out the edge of the lower transom deck, a good thirty feet below where he stood. The cradle was empty, the speed launch not having returned from where they had put in, leaving the jet skis and the dinghy. That platform was the heart of all temptation, and there was no one aboard who didn’t know it, which was why there was no way of accessing it. The doors leading to it from either side were kept locked, and in all the miles of circuits Ross had clocked, he failed to notice any indication of where or on whose person the keys were kept. The only other means of approach was via a twenty-foot drop from the rear of the helm-bridge two decks above, which could not be accessed without a guard being in full view. In fact, Ross found it hard to even look at the platform without his interest being noted. But something on this tub had to represent hope, otherwise he might as well join his dad on the saloon bridge, watching Clint Eastwood westerns and Spanish football re-runs.
Before all this had engulfed them, Ross had been concerned, as perhaps most men were, that he didn’t really know his dad, had never sounded his depths, looked for the finer explanations beneath the obvious. The most disappointing thing about this enforced solidarity and its ample opportunity for cross-generational soul-searching was that it had taught him he knew his dad just fine. What you saw really was what you got. The only thing he had actually learned from his father’s well-intentioned candour was that the person Ross really didn’t know was his mum, and with each conversation it had become patently clearer that Dad didn’t know her very well either.
The constant repetition in his head of Friggin’ in the Riggin’ had reminded him of an aspect of her he’d often wanted to know more about, but had seldom been encouraged to ask. His mum had seen the bloody Sex Pistols. She’d been a punk, in there when the real thing happened, first wave, not new wave, the Jubilee, safety pins, bin liners and England’s dreaming. And Ross knew almost nothing about it, mainly because it wasn’t something she ever seemed comfortable discussing. He’d never understood: surely having been in the midst of an era as exciting as that would provide a pool of nostalgia you’d never get fed up wallowing in. But most times it was brought up, she got coy, evasive, bashful, as though they were discussing something that made her very self-conscious, like an early career as a topless model. There were also times when she simply shook her head and seemed intolerant of the intrusion. When Ross got a little more mature, he began to suspect that perhaps something bad had happened to her during that period.
Then, with a little more insight, he realised that something bad did happen – he came into being.
Given this unprecedented access to his dad’s memories, the punk days were one of the first things he asked about, figuring if they’d met back then, he must have been ringside for some of it too.
‘Didn’t mean much to me,’ Dad said. ‘It was just the music of the time. I liked some of it, but you like whatever’s playing when you’re that age, don’t you? Not really my scene. Folk made out that it was like some kind of cultural revolution, but half the folk … no, three-quarters of the folk, were at those gigs and those clubs because it was Saturday night and that’s what was on. There wasnae even that many of them dressed up like you see in the photos. It’s all exaggerated.’
‘But Mum dressed up, I’m sure I heard.’
‘Oh, aye.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Nothing she’d be proud to recall, I’m sure. But I could see beneath the eye make-up and the dyed hair and the scruffy gear that there was a decent, normal, sensible girl in there.’
Decent, normal, sensible, Ross thought. What girl doesn’t dream of a man who’ll one day call her all those things?
‘Ach, to be honest, her falling pregnant was the saving of her, son. It was a dodgy crowd she was in with, some right ne’er-dowells.’
‘Falling pregnant?’ Ross asked blankly, feigning ignorance. ‘What are you telling me?’
His dad looked both confused and uncomfortable, it being the first time he had actually acknowledged to Ross that he’d been conceived ‘out of wedlock’. It was a little cruel, but he couldn’t resist, payback for years of pointless sham and denial, including Mum and Dad having an ‘official’ wedding anniversary on which the rabidly Catholic Granny Fleming came round and made show of presenting a card, months ahead of the real one that they celebrated just between themselves with a meal out and the kids packed off to Gran Bell’s for the night.
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye Page 34
