by Nick Lake
Then a few of the more alert people started angling towards the TV. Someone turned the volume up. I saw what was on the screen.
— It’s the Twin Towers, Mom said.
But I already knew that. Dad worked only a few blocks away from them, though that day he was on a business trip in Italy, which was why I was visiting Mom on my own. I wasn’t completely alone, naturally. Our driver was waiting for me on the gravelled drive, to take me back to our apartment by Central Park.
On screen, one of the towers was in flames. The room was really quiet at this point. Someone on the TV was saying something about a plane hitting the building, which sounded crazy – and that was ironic, given where we were. It was as if the maddest person in there wasn’t in the room at all, but on the TV. At the time it seemed like a terrible accident must have happened.
Then, as we were watching, the second plane hit the other tower and exploded. People in the room started screaming and, even at the age of ten, I knew how absurd this was, to be watching something so insane in the hospital, which was all disturbed people and drug addicts. Suddenly Mom also seemed to realise that this was pretty disturbing for a little girl, though actually I was more puzzled than freaked out by the whole thing. She took me by the hand and led me away, back to her room, but she didn’t want to hear me play the violin again.
Looking back, I think that was the last time I really saw my mom. After 9/11, she was never the same. I think now it must have been the strangeness of it: when she went into what was essentially a mental hospital, the world she left behind was a normal one, in which the Russians and the US had finally stopped trying to nuke each other, the West was safe and rich, and everything was right. Then she came out of there into a scary place, a different world, where people who didn’t care about security and cars and mortgages wanted to kill you.
Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe the last time she was herself was when she got out of hospital that time, and I came home from school to find that she’d covered my room with those little stars that glow after you turn out the lights. Not like some people do it – not, like, a few of them on the ceiling. I mean hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere, on every surface, so that, as she put it, I would remember that there is magic in the world. This was the kind of over-the-top thing my mom often came out with. She put them up in my London bedroom, too.
And for ever since then, you turn off the lights in my room and it’s like fairyland, like being in an observatory, with the universe all around you. A lot of the time – when Mom was well, I mean – I liked that.
Then she would get ill again, and everything would be terrible, and the stars would stop being comforting, would become like a prison instead, a glowing prison holding me inside, reminding me that Mom would always be all around me, would always be the biggest thing in my world, but that she wouldn’t always be with me.
Mom was often that way. She would give you something amazing. Stars. The universe.
But at some point she would take it away.
The thing about yachts I hadn’t realised before: they take a long time to get anywhere. Southampton to the Suez Canal was a month and a half. A month and a half! You could fly around the world, like, thirty times in that time.
The English Channel to Gibraltar was the worst. The sea was really choppy and rough, and for the first week I was just curled up in my en-suite bathroom, making good friends with the toilet. There were times when I would’ve quite happily strangled my dad for making me do this.
The Med was a bit better. You could see Morocco sometimes, this sandy haze to the south, and occasionally little fishing villages, with white roofs sloping down to the sea.
It didn’t exactly feel like a holiday. Most days we were far from the coast, just crawling through the water, which has no landmarks so doesn’t make you feel like you’re moving. It’s more like an endless conveyor belt of wetness and foam, unrolling underneath you.
I thought we might see dolphins, but we didn’t.
Time warped and stretched, like Play-Doh. It was August already and it was, like, thirty degrees, and I was over my seasickness by then, so I mostly lay on the deck, with my eyes closed. When the sun went down I would go in, read in my room, watch TV, send emails. The yacht wasn’t connected to the internet all the time, but the satellite link came online every day at 6 p.m. GMT. Any messages you wrote would be stored up until then to download or send, so I got used to checking my email every evening, to see if my friends had written to me.
Mainly, I just sat in my room at night, because I didn’t want to see the stars.
I caught Damian checking me out a couple of times as I lay there in my bikini. It was gross but pleasing at the same time. I mean, I’m not beautiful. I’m aware of that. I have this dirty brown hair, an ordinary face – apart from the bits of metal in it, of course, but I didn’t always have those.
What else did I do?
Not much.
I love abstract dance music, mainly dubstep. So I lay there all through the Mediterranean, listening to it cranked up loud, blocking out the world. There’s something about music like that: the depth of the bass, the echoes, the disembodied voices. It’s sad music, but the sadness is somehow a comforting kind of sadness; it makes me think of the way that seeing city lights across water – the Hudson River in New York, say – can make you feel lonely and warm at the same time.
Mostly, though, that kind of music makes me think of floating in space. Not space with stars, but black space, a cold vacuum, the sounds dispersing all around you. And when there are voices, they’re broken, fractured, seeming to come at you like distant singing from the radio of some destroyed spaceship. I know what I love about it: those voices in the darkness, in the deep bass, are like the voices of dead people who you love.
Something else about it I liked: it wasn’t classical music. Back when I was young, I listened to that stuff all the time. Actually, if we’re being technical it wasn’t classical music but baroque music that I loved – I was a sucker for Bach.
But, after Mom, I didn’t listen to it any more.
What with the music, then, and the sunbathing, and the fact that I hadn’t really been paying attention to the world around me ever since Mom died, I didn’t notice much of anything before the Suez Canal. The days passed, blurred together like squashed boiled sweets left in a warm pocket.
Then one day I happened to open my eyes to look at the sky and I caught a flash of light that I just knew was a reflection from Damian’s binoculars.
I don’t know why I did what I did next: to turn the tables, I suppose. Make him feel watched. Or like I knew he was watching.
I got up and I went up the short flight of stairs to the bridge. I walked right in there in my bikini. Damian turned round from the wheel, looking surprised and nervous.
— What’s up? he asked.
— Nothing, I said. Just bored.
Damian’s mouth flapped open a bit. But, to his credit, he got hold of himself pretty quickly. He was still rather pale from all that time in the bridge, out of the sun; his stubble was dark against his skin, like cross-hatching on paper.
— You want to be helpful? he asked.
— Sure, I said. Why not?
He walked towards me and came up really close, and, for a split second, like when someone in an oncoming car flicks their full beam at you to warn you about something ahead on the road, I thought that this was an unbelievably stupid idea. Then he brushed past me and picked up some papers from the table.
— We’re twelve hours from Port Said, Damian said. There’s a load of preparation we have to do. Information we have to radio ahead and documents we have to present when we get to the Suez Canal. It’ll be much quicker with you helping.
— Oh, OK, I said. Let me just, ah . . .
I backed out of the room, then followed the corridor to my cabin. What could I do? I’d tried to make him feel stupid, but he’d kept his cool and now it was me who looked like an idiot. Jesus! It probably look
ed like I fancied him or something, when it was him who was the creepy one, with his binoculars.
Anyway, I couldn’t back down now – if I’d said I wanted to help, then I had to help. I grabbed a T-shirt and some shorts, put them on and headed back to the bridge.
Damian had pulled up two chairs to the table.
— Right, he said. You find the capacity plan and the registered tonnage from this paperwork. I’ll find the engine plan.
— Yeah, I said. Great.
The Suez Canal is weird. You think you’re just going to sail through it, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s more organised, almost like public transport, only you’re in your own yacht.
For a start you have to moor in Port Said at the right time, by 19:00 hours the previous evening, or you’re not going, simple as that. This is because, Damian told me, it’s really busy going south in September. It’s to do with currents or winds or something.
Then you have to give all the documents I helped Damian pull together. It was ironic: I was the person who least wanted to be there, but I probably knew more about that yacht than anyone apart from the captain. I think Dad was pretty surprised when the official from the company that was helping us deal with the authorities boarded the yacht in the port and Damian beckoned me over to help talk to him.
In the end, we handed over the following documents to secure our passage through the canal:
Registration certificate.
Cargo manifest.
Crew list.
Ballast declaration.
Declaration of cargo and contents of the yacht’s double hull.
Engine room plan.
Registered tonnage.
Capacity plan.
And . . .
. . . a hundred dollar bill.
I don’t think Damian would have thought of that on his own. He kind of stood there blankly when the agent still had his hand out, even though we’d presented everything we were meant to present. So I had to nudge him and do that gesture where you rub your fingers together to show someone needs to be paid.
Anyway, we got the authorisation to go ahead. But that didn’t really mean going ahead; it meant joining up with the other ships in our convoy for the next day’s crossing. And that didn’t really mean day; it meant a crossing at one o’clock in the damn morning.
Still, I have to admit I stayed up for it. It was interesting, so sue me. We were one of only three yachts – all the others were cargo ships of various kinds. There was one that was ridiculous, like a floating city. I swear, the bridge and whatever else were, like, four storeys off the deck. We went one by one behind an official tug. The Daisy May was somewhere in the middle, and in the dark you could just see the lights of the ship in front of us and the one after us.
As we neared the middle of the canal, the sun started to come up. I stood on the deck, wrapped up in jumpers and scarves, shivering, watching. There was flat desert on either side of us, dirty yellow, and we were sailing down this great strip of blue that looked exactly like every canal you’ve ever seen, only enormous. More than big enough to fit the giant cargo ship that was in front of us. The whole thing was surreal.
We passed some structures on the banks that looked kind of military, which creeped me out, and then it all started to look rather samey – the desert, the canal – so I went back to my cabin and fell asleep pretty much straight away.
*
The next time I went out on deck, we were sailing down the coast of Egypt. That was when I started seeing a proper shoreline as opposed to just empty sea or the monotonous strip of the Suez Canal. What I could see, Damian told me, was the Sinai peninsula. It was all red sand, the leafless tracery of trees whose names I didn’t know, mountains dreaming in the background. I thought it was beautiful – it all sort of shimmered in the heat, and the blood colour of the sand was bright against the blue of the sea.
— That’s where Moses climbed the mount, said the stepmother, when she came out on deck. She pointed. And where he was supposed to have seen the burning bush, she added, before he came back down with the ten commandments.
— Right, I said.
— No, really, she answered. I climbed Mount Sinai when I was younger. And this is, of course, the Red Sea, that Moses parted.
I looked around me. It was weird to think that those things might have happened close by. I mean, I didn’t believe in the parting of the Red Sea, but it was still a story I’d known since I was very young. To think of it happening in a real place, and that place being here, was weird. It was like someone pointing to the horizon and saying, oh, look, there’s Never Never Land.
Sometime after that, Dad called for Damian to cast anchor and lower the diving deck. He’d been looking at some charts or something on the internet, and reckoned that there was an amazing reef right underneath us. He was all for getting out the scuba equipment, but the stepmother said she’d rather snorkel, so the two of them started getting out just masks and flippers and stuff.
— Come on, Amy, Dad said, as he took off his T-shirt. Loosen up a bit. Take those headphones out for once.
I looked at his pasty white skin, at the stepmother beside him, sitting down on the deck to pull on her flippers.
— I don’t think so, I said.
— The colours of the coral are going to be amazing, Amy-bear! Dad said.
— Good, I said. Enjoy them. I opened a magazine and plugged my earphones back in.
— Leave her, James, I dimly heard the stepmother saying, and Dad’s approaching footsteps stopped. Let her miss out.
Bitch, I thought, closing my eyes, as Dad walked away. Like I cared about missing out. I hadn’t even gone to their wedding. They got married at some registry office in Richmond and I went out with my friends and got wasted instead.
Even though I didn’t snorkel, I did like the Red Sea. I actually started looking around me from then on, especially after a school of dolphins turned up and followed our yacht for most of a day, jumping into the air, tumbling, the sea sparkling where they splashed it into the sky.
Another weird thing: I started to get why Dad had taken us on this trip. It was to do with the movement when you were on the front deck. You watched the sea coming towards you, endless, and you could turn and see the wake behind. It was like the yacht was moving all the time into the future, always leaving something behind. It was hypnotic. The blue sea, the red land, drifting by.
I understood what the yacht was, then: it wasn’t a boat; it was a machine for forgetting the past. I started to like it.
And then came the first time I heard about the pirates.
— We’re connected to SSAS, said Tony. He was giving us a security briefing in the cinema room. So if we think we’re under attack, he continued, the first thing that will happen is that Damian will hit an emergency button. It’s like dialling 999 on a boat – it will tell everyone who matters that we’re in trouble.
— Wait, I said. Why would we be in trouble? I’d turned up late, so didn’t really know what was going on.
— Pirates, said Tony. From Somalia. There’ve been a few ships taken this year. But we should be OK. We’re not going down the Somali coast – we’re just going through a bit of the Gulf of Aden. We’ll stay equidistant between Somalia and the Yemen at all times. We’ll be a hundred miles from Somalia.
— Oh, right, I said. That’s comforting. You didn’t mention bloody pirates, Dad.
— Actually, said the stepmother, Amy’s right. No one said anything about pirates. Why don’t we just go another way?
— We can’t, said Damian, who was sitting in an armchair at the back. We want to get to southern India before the monsoon season, and that means going this way.
— There are things we can do, Tony said in a reassuring tone. He was standing in front of the screen, and he picked up a remote and pushed a button. A film came up of a little wooden boat, scooting along the waves, men with headscarves inside it. They were holding guns, one of them shouldering what looked like a bazooka. The fi
lm seemed like it was taken from the deck of a larger boat, looking down. As we watched, the pirates’ boat came closer, and one of the men inside started reaching out to grab the netting on the side of the bigger boat. The person filming swung down to catch what was happening.
But then a jet of water came from nowhere, hitting the pirate square in the face, making him fall back into the little boat.
— Water cannon, Tony said, pausing the image. We have one on each side of the yacht, for fires. But if pirates come at us, we’ll man the cannon and use them to deflect attack.
— You’re talking about it like it’s going to happen, I said.
— Just being prepared, said Tony. A strong hose can stop pirates boarding. Just watch out for knots in the hose – something like that could make the difference between being taken captive and not. The hoses are powerful when used properly. Mr Fields, I’d ask you to take the starboard side, if that’s OK. I’d take portside. Damian would need to stay in the bridge to talk to any navy people, if we can raise them. Once you’ve got the nozzle in position, just open up and aim the water.
— Oh good, I said. They have bazookas and we have water pistols.
Tony glared at me.
— The point is to stop them getting on board, he said. They won’t shoot – we’re worth too much alive. As long as we can prevent them from boarding, we’ll be OK, hence the water cannon. We’ll also trail knotted ropes in our wake from now on. They stop boats from coming up behind us, because they snarl up in the outboards. And we’ll run dark from tomorrow night.
— Dark? asked my dad.
— Like in the Blitz, said Tony. No lights at night. All curtains drawn. We don’t want to be seen from afar. He pointed to a table, where he’d laid out what looked like rolls of black bin bags, sheets and towels. I’ll need everyone’s help to block all the windows, please, he said. We don’t want any light getting out.
