After the Storm (4 page)

‘Now don’t mind my nonsense. Are you religious, Anna?’

Anna pulled her gaze away from the Mennonite family.

‘No, I’m not. I was thinking how strange it is to see them here. They look so different to everyone else and it’s kind of brave not to mind that, isn’t it? What do they do here?’

‘They’re farming people. I was told a lot of them came out here after Hurricane Hattie, to do relief work. Good people I guess.’

Kim steered them to the soaps and shampoos.

‘I’ll get us shampoo and conditioner, not that it works for me. My hair is so wild.’

Kim’s dark blonde hair was a mass of springy curls that bounced around her face and shoulders.

‘You’re lucky Kimberly. My hair is so straight.’

Anna pulled her band out and her dark brown hair dropped to just above her breasts. She had no fringe and her hair parted naturally in the centre. The two women looked at each other.

‘We always want what we haven’t got,’ Anna said.

They smiled at each other and it was a moment of connection, the first moment of connection all day.

‘Tea bags,’ Anna said.

‘What?’

’Can we get some tea bags? I can’t survive without my tea.’

‘Sure.’

Anna fetched a big box of tea bags. Kim spotted a stand of magazines and newspapers against the wall. She pushed the loaded trolley over and reached for a copy of US
Vogue
. She started to thumb through the pages.

‘Oh these clothes… look at these clothes. I used to dress up once. You wouldn’t think so now, would you?’

Anna looked over her shoulder as Kim flicked through the photos of New York Fashion Week, the tall angular models striding along the catwalk and the celebrity audience watching from the front row.

‘Rob’s sister Savannah is a model. She does some of the big shows. She’s quite a big deal really.’

‘That’s so cool. Are you close?’

‘She’s a lovely girl, but quite a lot younger than Rob, and we don’t see her that often.’

‘I
love
clothes. But you have to give up out here.’

Kim was wearing black shorts and a fitted turquoise tank top with a thick yellow-and-green woven money belt clinched around her trim waist. To Anna’s eyes she looked perfectly fashionable. She was a jeans and T-shirt woman herself and had never got the whole fashion thing. Kim turned the pages, closed the magazine and looked at the cover price. She wrinkled her nose:

‘Stupid price for a magazine…’

She put it back on the rack but still she looked at the magazines laid out in front of her. She turned to Anna:

‘I forgot to get any tomato puree. Can you go get two tubes Anna?’

‘Sure.’

Anna moved away. At the end of the aisle she glanced back and saw Kimberly slipping two of the magazines into her bag.

Kim paid for the groceries with Rob’s dollars and they walked out of the supermarket.

‘Elbert should be over with his trolley soon. There’s no way we can shift this lot on our own.’

They watched as the Mennonite woman and her two daughters came out of the store and stacked their groceries into a horse-drawn cart. A young boy was holding the horse’s bridle. He was dressed in denim overalls and a straw hat and looked about twelve years old. The family got up into the buggy and the mother drove them down the road. Anna saw how the woman was expert at controlling the horse and the buggy. And she also seemed driven by her own firm sense of purpose that had nothing to do with the norms of the present day. How strange an accident of birth and fate it was that this group of German descendants should be living and farming in Belize in Central America.

They waited outside the store with their many bags grouped around them and there was no sign of Elbert. A sudden violent rainstorm broke overhead and they had to move everything back under the canopy of the store. The rain hurled down with such force that it made the windows of the store rattle.

‘We’ll have to wait till it stops,’ Kim shouted.

The summer storm continued for ten minutes. There was an awkwardness between them now. Anna stood looking out at the sheet of rain.

‘These rainstorms come from nowhere. Nothing we can do,’ Kim said finally. She was finding Anna hard work. Her first impression the night before was right, Anna was reserved and not an easy person to talk to.

And then as fast as it had come it stopped. The streets were covered in puddles and water gushed along the gutters. A few minutes later Elbert showed up with a flat wooden trolley on four wheels. The three of them loaded all the bags onto his trolley and he steered it back to the quay. It was low water and the boat was no longer swinging, its keel had dug into the mud. They unloaded the shopping and carried it below. Then Elbert went off with his trolley to meet Owen at the warehouse as instructed.

‘Where exactly did Rob and Owen go?’ Anna asked.

It had now been hours since they had set off together.

‘To this liquor warehouse on the edge of town and I’ll bet Raul’s been giving them drinks. He’s the owner and he’s always generous with the whisky bottle.’

Kim was sorting through the provisions, putting some foodstuffs in the cool box and others in the food locker, singing under her breath.

‘I think I’ll unpack our stuff and lie down for a bit. I had a bad night last night,’ Anna said.

‘Sure, I’ll help you make up the bed.’

Kim got a clean double sheet out of one of the lockers and spread this over the two mattresses to make it into a double. She gave Anna another sheet for the top. There was a yellowing quilt which was rolled in the corner.

‘Usually the sheet is enough. You’ve got that quilt for colder nights.’

‘Great, thanks.’

Once she was alone in the forecabin and the door was shut Anna allowed herself a few tears. There was so little space on this boat and nowhere to escape to if you felt the need to be alone, except for this one small cabin. And they would be living in such close quarters with two strangers they knew nothing about. Kimberly had sent her off to get the tomato puree so that she could take those magazines. It was the sneakiness of the act rather than the actual taking of the magazines that had jarred with her. She did not want to give in to these negative feelings. She was tired out by the events of the last twenty-four hours and hoped that once they were sailing, her spirits would lift. She stretched out on the thin mattress and closed her eyes.

Two hours later Owen, Rob and Elbert appeared with the trolley stacked high with the ten cases of liquor.

‘I see we won’t run out of rum,’ Kim said.

Owen supervised the stowing of the cases in the small berth at the back of the boat. When this was done and the others had left the saloon he pushed Raul’s package right down the side and lashed this and the cases in with a rope. He knew what Kim’s reaction would be if she got wind of Raul’s package. They had fought about it before. He paid Elbert his fee for the day and then went to work on the engine.

Rob went through to the front cabin and found Anna stretched out on the mattress. She was half asleep and was very pleased to see him. She put her arms around his neck and he kissed her fondly and started to nuzzle her.

‘I smell whisky,’ she said sleepily.

It was too late to sail far that evening. Owen had got the diesel engine working again. It was corroded inside, that was the problem. He rarely used the engine, except for getting in and out of moorings. Truth be told he was suspicious of sailors who over-relied on their engines. The wind and the sails were what you should rely on. The tide had risen slowly so that the
El Tiempo Pasa
was now afloat. He said they would motor a little way out and anchor some distance from Belize City. As they moved away from the Quay Rob noticed how the water changed colour from a sludgy brown to dark turquoise. The dinghy was attached to the boat by a rope and it moved smoothly through the water behind them. Rob liked being on this old wooden boat, it was his kind of vessel. Anna came up and sat with them in the cockpit. There was now an easy banter between Owen and Rob.

Kim was down in the galley and she could hear the three of them talking up above. She opened the cool box and took out some chicken thighs and breasts and put them on the chopping board. She unzipped her belt and got out her knife. Then she heard someone coming into the saloon and she quickly threw a tea towel over the chopping board and the knife. It was Anna.

‘Can I help?’ she asked.

‘That’s real kind of you, but there’s so little room down here,’ Kim said.

It was true. The saloon felt crowded if there were more than two of them down there. And the galley space was particularly restricted.

‘If you’re sure?’

‘I am, thanks. I like cooking. It’s what I want to do one day.’

‘Be a chef?’

‘Have my own café. You know, paninis at lunchtime and dishes in the evening. I’d do a Menu of the Day and offer a few good dishes.’

‘Sounds a good plan, hard work though,’ Anna said.

She went back up the steps into the cockpit thinking that just as Owen looked at ease moving around the boat above so Kim looked completely at home in her tiny kitchen.

Kim lifted the tea towel and picked up her knife. She made incisions in the skin of the chicken breasts and thighs and rubbed salt, black pepper and cayenne powder into the meat, then spooned brown sugar and squeezed the juice of an orange over it all. The orange was full of pits, not like the ones at home. Florida oranges were the best. She had worked as a waitress in Clearwater at one of the upscale restaurants and Manny, the chef there, had taught her this dish. He had been the kindest man and she would never have lasted at the restaurant without his friendship. Unfortunately he had fallen for her in a big way and wanted more. She was already in love with Owen, had been for years, although she was not dating him. She told Manny that, when he asked her out. They became good friends anyway. At the end of her shifts she would stay behind at the restaurant and Manny would teach her how to make sauces and how to cook fish and steak the right way.

Kim brought up the spicy fried chicken with rice, the food already served up in four plastic bowls, and forks to eat it with.

‘This is so good,’ Rob said.

‘Yes it’s delicious, thanks Kimberly.’

‘Kimmie can cook,’ Owen said.

‘I worked in this restaurant back home and the chef taught me a lot.’

Later she handed them glasses of rum and lime and they sat looking out at the distant lights of Belize City as the boat rocked gently.

‘It looks a lot nicer from here,’ Rob said.

‘I don’t want to go back there ever,’ Anna said.

‘It’s not that bad is it?’ Owen said.

‘Last night we were chased through the streets by this man with a knife!’ she said.

Kim looked startled and darted a glance at Owen.

‘You were unlucky there,’ he said.

Anna and Rob decided to turn in for their first night on board. They negotiated the cramped washing facilities and then discovered there was no room if they both stood up in their cabin at the same time to undress. Rob stripped off first and climbed onto the bed. Finally they were lying next to each other with the porthole curtains drawn, the sheet pulled over them and the cabin door closed. She whispered to him:

‘We won’t get much chance to have private conversations.’

‘We won’t get much chance to have sex either.’

She dropped her voice:

‘Kimberly stole two magazines from the big store we went to.’

‘Oh well, you two spent a fortune in there.’

‘I know we did. I didn’t like the sneaky way she did it. She asked me to go get some stuff and took them then.’

‘Don’t brood on it. It’s not important,’ he said.

He considered telling her about the package he had seen Owen slipping into his rucksack but he knew this would worry her. He had his suspicions about what it contained. He kissed her and rolled over and she snuggled into him and the boat rocked gently from side to side and they fell asleep.

Kim washed the dishes and put them away, folded the table and made her bed up in the saloon. She stretched out and closed her eyes. She could see that Owen and Rob were already comfortable with each other but she wondered why Anna had agreed to come on the boat because she had looked ill at ease all day.

Owen was up on deck lying with a blanket around him. He was thinking about how to organise the next day’s sailing. Living on a boat took some careful planning, and he knew Rob and Anna would need some time to adjust. They would do the short sail to Home’s Cay tomorrow so that he could teach them the basics of sailing the boat. He wanted to make sure they were up for the longer sail to Roatán. The island was 138 miles away and he intended to take the sail slowly.

Anna woke up in the middle of the night. Her stomach was cramping badly and she needed to go to the toilet. She didn’t know if it was the spicy chicken or that bitter coffee she’d had at the market that had upset her stomach; probably the coffee, which had been a mistake. Rob was asleep. She wriggled out from under the sheet and opened their cabin door as quietly as she could. The door to the heads was on her right and the door to the saloon where the others slept was closed. In the dark she fiddled with the door and got it open. She went into the cubicle and sat down on the toilet, just in time. There was a small porthole in the wall behind her and faint moonlight came in. She wiped herself thoroughly. She knew she had to use the lever and flush the system through as Kimberly had said. In the silence of the night it was going to make the most awful racket and wake the others. Well, she had no choice. With a grimace she started to work the lever, pumping it up and down. It was even noisier than she remembered and made a horribly suggestive sucking sound. She was cringing inside as she worked the lever up and down again and again. This was what she had feared, the lack of privacy on a boat. Rob often teased her about how fastidious she was. For good measure she pumped the lever two more times. The noise seemed to go on for ages and then it gurgled to a stop. She peered into the toilet bowl and it was clear.