Hostage Three

by Nick Lake

  His messages were funny.

  They started off like:

  I’m so disappointed in you.

  I thought you knew better.

  It’s your future and you’re throwing it away.

  Then they got all like:

  I appreciate what you’re going through.

  Maybe you can resit next year.

  Let’s talk about it.

  I ignored them.

  The third night after the exam, I got home late, drunk, in a taxi – the same way that the stepmother came into our lives eighteen months before.

  I knew how to climb the stairs so they wouldn’t creak. I went to my room and stretched out on my bed, the walls spinning around me. Then I heard murmuring voices. I got up, heavily, and put my ear to the wall. The stepmother was talking.

  — . . . getting more self-destructive, I heard her say.

  — Mumble, mumble, said my dad.

  — But what if . . . what if it’s genetic? the stepmother said. Don’t you think . . . something, something . . . therapy? I mean, have you seen that stuff in her face?

  — Mumble, said my dad. Mumble. Only two A levels. No chance of the Royal Academy now.

  I pulled back from the wall like it was a wasp that had stung me. I touched the bolt in my eyebrow. I’m not destroying myself, I thought. I’m marking myself.

  But was that true? I knew what I liked about loud music, drinking, smoking: I liked that they made me disappear, even if for a short while.

  God, I thought. What if it is genetic? I thought of the scars on Mom’s arms and my piercings.

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  I came downstairs in the morning and found the stepmother at the kitchen table, waiting for me. At first I thought she was going to confront me about the night before, but she didn’t. Instead, she indicated the chair opposite her.

  — Sit down, Amy, she said. I have something to tell you. Your dad wanted to tell you himself, but he had to get into work early for an emergency meeting.

  I looked at the table. There were all these maps laid out on it, while Ham Common spread before us, glistening with dew, on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling windows Mom always liked because they brought in the light.

  — What? I said, my eyes on the maps. You’re sending me away?

  — No, said the stepmother, frowning. Remember that yacht? The one your dad mentioned?

  I was hungover, and this whole thing was surreal.

  — What yacht?

  — The Daisy May. Don’t you remember?

  I vaguely recalled Dad going on about some boat, on one of the few evenings when he was around, saying how he might buy it and sail it round the world.

  — I guess, I said.

  — Well, said the stepmother. He’s bought her.

  — Bought her? I said, confused.

  For an instant, a crazy thought went through my mind – that Dad had bought some other woman. Because you could kind of say that he had bought the stepmother, what with all the Cartier jewellery and Louboutin shoes and stuff.

  — The yacht, she said. He bought it.

  I sat down. The maps were kind of swimming in front of me. A yacht. OK, that’s normal, I thought.

  — So? I said, my voice coming out even more sullen than I meant it to. He’s always buying things.

  I looked her hard in the eye so she would know what I meant, know that I was talking about her. Then I glanced at the Cartier bracelet on her wrist, just in case she hadn’t got the message.

  — Well, she said, not rising to it. This time he’s bought a yacht. By the way, there are bagels keeping warm in the oven. And I bought that cream cheese with chives that you like.

  — Thanks, I mumbled.

  — Go on, she said. Have one. They’re good.

  This was the worst thing about the stepmother. I could basically do anything – swear at teachers, take drugs, insult her, go to parties and not come back till the next day – and she would act like nothing had happened. It just made me feel even more awful, which I think was probably her cunning plan all along.

  I went and got a bagel from the oven, put it on a plate.

  — I don’t understand, I said. We’re talking about the yacht? The one that was on the web for, like, thirty million pounds?

  — That’s the one, said the stepmother. It’s dry-docked at Southampton. We’re going to leave as soon as we find a captain and crew. I mean, if you want to, that is.

  — Leave? For where?

  — Everywhere.

  — Sorry, what are you talking about?

  — A trip. Your dad has always wanted to do a round-the-world trip, so that’s what we’re going to do. Starting in a couple of weeks.

  I stared at her. I wanted to think she was joking, but deep down I knew she wasn’t. Dad was always mad for boats, though he didn’t know how to sail them himself. And way before the Event, too, he was talking about taking me out of school for a year to do some kind of epic trip. Mom always said it was a silly idea, that it would never happen, but then a lot of things Mom said didn’t come true. Anyway, I guess after the piercings and the smoking in the gym and all that stuff, he must have got even more into the idea. The stepmother had mentioned therapy, but Dad hated that kind of thing after what happened with Mom, so I think the yacht was his alternative, his idea of a better kind of treatment.

  I looked down at the maps. Someone – Dad, I guess – had drawn little dotted lines on them that went all around the world, across the Atlantic and the Pacific, down to Australia, along the coast of India, the Caribbean. Yes – everywhere.

  — Why? I said.

  — Why? For a change of scene. You know, a new beginning.

  — Are you going to spend the whole day speaking in clichés? I asked.

  — Oh, Amy, she said. We thought you’d be excited.

  — We? I said. Dad can’t even be bothered to be here to tell me himself.

  — He wanted to, he just –

  — Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I’m not leaving here or leaving my friends to get on a stupid yacht.

  — You’re not eighteen yet, Amy, said the stepmother. You don’t really have a choice.

  I held my breath in case it came out in fumes, like a dragon breathing.

  — I’ll be eighteen in October, I said. Where will we be then? India? Japan? I’ll just get off the boat and fly home.

  — If that’s what you want, said the stepmother blandly.

  I took a breath.

  — It doesn’t matter anyway, I said. Because this is totally not going to happen. Dad will pull out of the trip. You haven’t known him long enough to see that. It’ll be just like the holiday to Hawaii. And Goa. And the Northern Lights. Just like going to see Santa Claus when I was eight. Oh, no, wait, you weren’t around then, were you? And those things never happened. Just like this will NEVER HAPPEN.

  The stepmother pursed her lipsticked lips and put her hands on the table. She drew in a long breath.

  — I’ll make coffee, she said.

  The thing is, though, I was right. Dad literally did nothing but work. We never even went to the beach house in North Fork any more, like we used to when we lived in New York. I couldn’t count the number of trips he had bailed on, like when Mom and I went to Mexico without him, and saw the turtles laying their eggs.

  Dad was very high up in a bank that had its logo on every street in London and New York, too, and he was always, always super-busy. Dad had a fortune, yes, but he was also a slave to the business. People noticed Dad – he was handsome, I have to admit, and had this grey hairstyle that you call distinguished. But what you saw when you looked at Dad was something as much like a wolf as a person. What you saw was hunger. For money, for success. It wasn’t ruthlessness, not precisely – just hunger. I think a lot of people saw that, and they liked it, and that was why Dad was so good at charming everyone.

  At the end of the day, though, it was all about the money and his hunger for the money. No way was Dad going to take a
whole year off to go gallivanting around the world, which was the kind of word he used a lot when talking about people with less drive than himself.

  As it turned out, I was wrong about that, too.

  *

  A few days later, on Saturday, there was a knock at my door, and then Dad came into the room.

  — You really should open your curtains, Amy, he said. It’s practically the afternoon.

  — Good to see you, too, I said.

  He went over to the curtains and threw them open, flooding the room with light.

  I blinked, wincing.

  — You need clothes, he said.

  — I thought I looked quite nice, I replied, looking down at my pyjamas with ducks on them.

  — Ha, ha, said Dad. For the trip. You need clothes for the trip.

  — The trip?

  — You know – the one around the world . . . the yacht.

  I stared at him . . . I hadn’t actually seen Dad since the cigarette incident. He’d always been at work, and I’d assumed the trip had been forgotten. I hadn’t really thought about it since the weird conversation with the stepmother.

  — You’re seriously going to do that? I said. You’re kidding, right?

  He frowned.

  — No, I’m not kidding. Why would I kid about this?

  That was a fair point. Dad wasn’t keen on jokes – he felt about them the same way he felt about most things that couldn’t be sold.

  — But . . . When are we leaving?

  — The fifteenth of July.

  — That’s three weeks away!

  — I know, he said. That’s why you need to buy some stuff.

  — How long will it be, the trip?

  — Six months, eight months maybe. We’re still working out the details of the itinerary.

  — But what about your job?

  — I’m taking a sabbatical, he said.

  — Oh, Jesus. You really are serious, I said.

  — Yes, of course. So, I told you, you need clothes. There’ll be a range of climates, and we should expect some bad weather at sea. I’ve made you a list.

  He stepped over to my bed, where I was propped up on cushions, watching TV, and handed me a sheet of ruled paper. I looked at the list. There were a lot of things on it. And not just clothes – toiletries, a mosquito net, sunglasses . . .

  — Come on, get up, he said. Busy day. I’ve booked you in for your shots, too.

  — Shots? I said.

  — Immunisations. Cholera, hepatitis, et cetera. Sarah and I have already had them. Then it’s Oxford Street to get the clothes.

  Despite myself, I felt a little squirm of excitement in the pit of my belly. Not about the trip – I still didn’t believe that was going to happen – but about spending a day with my dad. It had been so long since we’d hung out together – since the Event, I guess.

  — OK, I said. Just let me have a shower. What time are we leaving?

  — We? he said, baffled.

  A falling feeling.

  — We . . . me and you. To go shopping. To get the shots. To do everything that you were just talking about.

  — Oh, I’m not coming, said Dad. And suddenly I noticed – why hadn’t I noticed before? – that he was wearing one of his better suits, that his shoes were shined. I have to go in, he said. A partners’ meeting.

  Of course, I thought.

  He put his hand in his inside jacket pocket, drew something out. He threw it on to the bed at my feet. A black credit card.

  — There you go, he said. Knock yourself out. If you see anything you like, anything that’s not on the list, get that, too.

  I didn’t reply because I didn’t trust my voice not to go, didn’t trust myself not to cry, and that would make me look like such a girl. I just looked down.

  When I looked up, he was gone.

  We set sail on the fifteenth of July, just like Dad said.

  Was I happy to be leaving? I don’t know, and that’s the truth. It was going to be a year in close confinement with Dad and the stepmother, which didn’t sound like a festival of fun. But it wasn’t school. And though there wasn’t much point in packing the Marlboro Lights – Dad hates smoking – at least there were going to be beaches. Mostly, I think I just didn’t care that much about the trip. I didn’t have anything better to do. It sounds stupid, but it’s true.

  And then there was the yacht. It was quite something, and that made it almost worthwhile. Esme would have called it totally a-MAY-zing. Actually, she probably did. After we drove down to Southampton to go aboard, I took a photo of it on my phone and uploaded it to Facebook, and she and Carrie went crazy over it.

  It had two sails, which I thought at first were just for show, but which Damian, the captain hired by Dad, said would take us up to a dozen knots when combined with the engine, whatever that meant. It was white and sleek and graceful, despite its size. It looked like a Rolls Royce parked at a broken-down factory against the grey concrete blocks of Southampton. Even the gulls seemed afraid to go near it, to cover it with their droppings.

  — This is going to be good, said Dad, as we walked up the gangplank. Some proper time together, as a family.

  — Whatever, I said, which was all that little statement merited.

  Up top was the bridge, where Damian would steer or drive or whatever, and a kind of bar or dining-room area with remote-controlled roll-up sides, for eating al fresco if you wanted, as the stepmother said with a squeal. Below decks were five en-suite bedrooms, then below those, a cinema room, a games room and access to the diving deck. I already had a Padi licence (I went to that kind of school) and Dad had done his scuba-diving qualification in preparation for the trip.

  On the diving deck were a lifeboat and a dinghy with an outboard motor – so we could take sojourns to the shore. That’s the stepmother talking again.

  Basically, the only thing the Daisy May didn’t have was a helipad, and if there’d been a yacht available with one, Dad would have bought it. But the push for this whole crazy idea came from me leaving school, so he had to take what he could get at the time.

  What he could get, in addition to the Daisy May, was:

  Damian, the aforementioned captain. Kind of hot, in an old, Brad Pitt kind of way, with sparkling green eyes and an Irish lilt.

  Felipe, the cook. Not hot. Spoke English with a very strong accent. And, as I’d already learned at the cooking auditions Dad had insisted on having, a pretty awesome maker of pancakes.

  Tony, the . . . I don’t know what you’d call him, really. Guide, maybe, mixed with a bit of security. Not the leader – because that was obviously my dad – but the guy who was meant to know where to go and what to see, and what places to avoid. Dad had worked out some kind of complicated deal when he bought the yacht, and the bank was insuring it. Tony was part of the deal: if Dad wanted to go without him, he would have to pay the insurance himself, and Dad was too smart with money to do that.

  In the end, putting Tony on the yacht didn’t turn out to be that much of a genius idea on the company’s part.

  Anyway, Tony was sort of a six where hotness is concerned. Neither hot nor not. He was just one of those men who you see all the time – average height, average weight, hair going grey. He had a touch of a West Country accent, but that was about the most interesting thing you could say for him. For all that, though, he was basically the most powerful person on board, after Dad. I mean, Damian was the captain, but he was just there for the nautical stuff. Tony was there to keep us alive.

  First thing I did on board, I went down to my room – Dad insisted on calling it my berth – and unpacked my stuff. I had a double bed, a plasma-screen TV with a DVD player and my own bathroom. I put my photo of Mom on my bedside table, the one in the silver frame, where she’s pregnant with me, standing by the side of a pool in Greece, laughing, not caring that she’s in this green bikini with this absolutely massive stomach.

  I put all my stuff away, and that was when I found my violin. It was at the bottom
of my biggest suitcase – I had a matching set from Burberry that had appeared in my bedroom at home a week before departure, to go with all the stuff I bought on Dad’s credit card. The violin was underneath my clothes, kept safe in its padded case. The breath caught in my throat.

  You see, the violin was from Before. I don’t know who packed it, my dad or the stepmother, but I guess it was my dad and he should have known better. Just looking at it brought back all these memories, fluttering at me; my memories were moths in the darkness and the violin was a light.

  For example, I remembered the private hospital, on the day the Twin Towers fell.

  I must have been ten, and my mother was a month or so into a stay in this very expensive place in upstate New York, near Cold Spring. She was getting better – she’d had a few doses of electroshock therapy, which was the only thing that ever did any good – but she’d put on weight since the day she arrived there, seventy pounds, and she was shaking.

  I also remembered the previous visit when I was in the dining hall with her and she started screaming for no reason at all, saying that the nurses wanted to poison her.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: they don’t do shit like electroshock therapy any more. You are wrong.

  This was a long time before I knew the terms OCD or Severe Clinical Depression, but, believe me, I knew all about OCD and Severe Clinical Depression.

  On September the eleventh, I had brought the violin to the clinic because I was auditioning for a new music school, and Mom said she wanted to hear me play, that it would be like sunshine in this place. So we went to her room, which was actually like a suite in a really nice five-star hotel, no matter what she said about how terrible the hospital was, and I played for her. I played one of Paganini’s Caprices, because that was the kind of little show-off that I was.

  While I was playing, Mom smiled. I hadn’t seen her smile in weeks, and just seeing that, it was like something opened inside me, and she was right – sunshine was blazing through, lighting up everything.

  After that, we went downstairs to the common room. The TV was on. A few people were playing dominoes – I don’t know what it is about dominoes and the mentally ill, but they love that game. A few other people were playing cards or chatting. Most of them were watching the TV. That, and drooling and so on. It was super-quiet in there, like a waiting room, but I don’t know what the people were waiting for. Themselves, I guess. Waiting for themselves to get better.