Lifeboat (15 page)

‘I'll be fine in a minute,' I said, trying to rise.

‘Wait a moment – take your time.'

‘No, we have to go,' I said, straightening up.

He heard the urgency in my voice and looked around. ‘Wait here – don't move.'

He took off at a run down the street, waving his arms like a drunken signalman. It looked quite bizarre until I realised he was flagging a taxi, indicating to the driver to turn about. Within moments we were inside, on the way to my house.

‘And hurry, please,' I said.

I took the time during the cab ride to collect my thoughts, praying that I was wrong, although I knew I wasn't. We reached my house with no further conversation and I knew as soon as we walked through the door that I was not wrong. My map box was closed, but it had been moved to the kitchen table. I didn't need to look inside to know that it was empty. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest.

‘They've taken my boat,' I said, leaning against the kitchen wall. I dropped my forehead onto the cool wood of the box, seeking comfort in the familiar smell. ‘They've taken my boat and there's a storm coming.'

The doctor frowned, then asked: ‘Is there? Even so, if he is who they say he is he can sail.'

‘He can. But it won't make any difference. No one should be out in a storm such as this – even commercial vessels would turn back to shelter.'

‘He has survived this long.'

I lowered the box and stared at the doctor.

‘He's no pirate.'

‘How do you know?'

I thought that in light of the storm, his identity was immaterial.

‘He's no pirate,' I repeated softly.

‘Won't he hear the storm warnings and turn back?'

I shook my head, exasperated that he didn't understand.

‘What warnings? Look outside.'

The sun was still shining, no storm clouds gathered. This storm would hit with no warning, dropping from the sky like an avenging angel.

‘He might see it ahead and turn back?'

‘No, they won't be able to tell what they're sailing into, but they know what they're running from. He won't turn back.'

‘Why has he taken her? If not as a hostage, then what?' the doctor said. ‘He risked a lot by carrying her with him.'

‘He loves her. Would you leave a loved one behind?'

‘If it's safer for her here?'

‘But he doesn't know that. They're strangers in this country – they don't speak the language. And I wasn't there to help them.'

‘But it's an admission of guilt to run.'

I threw my precious box to the floor in anger.

‘Only if you know you are guilty. Remember what he has forgotten.'

‘Or says he has,' said the doctor softly, reaching out a hand to calm me. ‘I don't think you should dismiss their allegations so easily. He may be who they say he is.'

‘He is not,' I shouted. ‘He cannot be. And she loves him. I've seen them every day. I know them. You heard how she reacted to his arrest.'

‘That can be easily explained; it's quite common for the captive to empathise with the captor – it's a survival mechanism.'

The doctor dropped his voice, almost pleading with me. ‘And think, who else does she have but him?'

I turned away.

‘Whatever the truth,' he continued, ‘she's not safe.'

My continued silence brought him to my side.

‘Are you alright? How are you feeling?' he asked.

‘Fine, thank you,' I said, trying to smile for him.

‘We can't tell the right or wrong of it,' he said, ‘but if you're alright, I think I should go to the police. If they do track them down, I could be of assistance.'

I nodded, wanting him gone, for I had just seen something: a small corner of paper poking out from beneath the fallen map box, a note. It was not true what the doctor said, she did have someone else – me. I'd failed them so far, but this time I would not. I hoped the note told in which direction they had headed, for I was not going to let them sail to their deaths.

But I wouldn't risk the doctor's life as well, and I couldn't let him try to stop me going. So I just nodded and smiled.

‘That's a good idea. I think I might have a lie down anyway.'

He gave me a quick hug.

‘Don't worry – it'll be fine, we'll find them. Maybe they're just hiding somewhere.'

I went to the next room and lay down upon the sofa, feigning fatigue. The doctor followed me.

‘I'll go then,' he said. ‘You have a rest. I'll be back as soon as I can. And would you lock the doors, please?'

I waited five minutes before scrambling to my feet and retrieving the note from the kitchen. It was in an unfamiliar hand, his, I presumed. It read:

My child, please forgive us. I know we are taking what you value most, but I have no choice. That we leave without seeing you saddens me greatly, but I willfind a way to contact you as soon as we are safe. I plan to sail due north and take our chances in the islands there. You are ever in our hearts and thoughts, thank you for everything. With much love, Yourfriend

THE CASTAWAYS

There was a man and there was a woman, who met and married in sunlit days, before war took him to fighting and death, and her to the edge of reason.

‘Love has died'she said, shredding the telegram with her gnashing teeth.

‘In a foxhole in the desert' she cried, tossing the pieces into the still air of the delivery room and watching them fall like confetti to the floor.

‘But love can be reborn' whispered the nuns, who fluttered about her bed like moths drawn to the light of life.

Then the woman's cries of pain were drowned by the bombs thatfell on London, and when the woman awoke she saw that the confetti had turned to rice about a grave.

The death of a child is the death of hope. Without hope the woman locked herself away from the world, in a place where the wallpaper whispered to the shrouded souls within and Don Quixote and the devil kept company in their minds.

Through nights devoid of dreams the woman stared up at the moon. In daylight hours doctors practised ancient Chinese arts upon her brain, hoping to draw the pain from the wound by way of wax candles to the ears. But her heart had shattered in the blast that took her child.

This woman wore the deaths of a husband and a daughter next to her skin, keeping the warmth out and the cold in.

But the man was still living. One grave in Libya lay empty, a mistake common in war where victory ignores the number of the dead. With no warning he returned, to find his family gone. What pain to have lived through war only to find everything worth fighting for has died.

He found her sinking in a bath of madness; she met him with Medusa hair and a stranger's eyes. He was the enemy again, but like shadows and windmills, this foe he couldn't fight. So he retreated, wandering the world, hoping to meet her again in sunshine, like when they were young.

Time is a blind man upon a roadway, each moment a step towards the unknown. In time, she shook the madness from her skin and stepped back into the turning world. She sought her centre, that place within the spinning where she could be still. She sought him. Love came around again and they met, moving with the spinning stars under an African sky.

But ancient starlight illuminates the present with the past, making the shadows of memory into monsters too real to be borne.

Storm clouds loomed, so they set sail on their past, to outrun the storm. On the open sea it caught up with them, sank their boat, scuttled their memories and set them adrift in a lifeboat – strangers looking for home.

DAY THIRTEEN

I ran into the street. The air clung, thick and still, like cotton wool; I could feel the weight of the atmosphere pressing down upon me. The breeze had died down and the finches no longer flitted amongst the bushes. An unnatural quiet cloaked a world becalmed. But this could work in my favour. Although they had taken my yacht, I still had the dinghy, and in it I could outrun them.

I needed to get to the mooring quickly. My neighbour's bicycle leant against her fence. I was wheeling it on to the road as she came to her front door, bag in hand. She called out in surprise, but upon recognising me, smiled and raised a hand to wave.

‘I'll explain later,' I called as I hoisted myself into the saddle.

‘Alright, dear,' she replied, waving me off. ‘You have a good time.'

This had been only our second conversation. I hoped her generosity was a good omen.

I got up the hill as fast as I could, concentrating on nothing more than the push of the pedal. At the top of the climb I stopped to catch my breath and scan the seascape in front of me. The water was flat, in a way water shouldn't be. There was not a vessel in sight. I straightened myself in the saddle and pushed off down the hill.

I cannot remember how I reached the bottom in one piece. The bicycle rattled and shook, as if trying to throw me, but I clung on, my legs pushing around and around with cartoon-like speed, forcing the bicycle on faster.

At the bottom I threw it aside and ran to the jetty. The adrenalin of the ride had put me in a strange, senseless place, where I felt nothing, like I was in a bubble cocooning me from sensation. I was intent on only one thing. My dinghy floated at my mooring, fifty yards from the shore and my boat was gone. Without stopping to think I kicked off my shoes and threw myself into the bay, barely registering the chill of the water, and struck out for the dinghy.

On board, all was as I had left it the last time I'd been out, that wonderful day with the castaways. The tanks were almost full; the engine started first go. I found the compass in the hold, cast off and pointed due north, full throttle.

Within minutes I was in open sea, alone under an empty sky. Today there were no seabirds – like me they could sense the impending storm and would be safely on shore. I breathed a little easier now that I was underway. I started to regain sensation. I would find them. And once we had found shelter, we could plan our next move together.

I shivered. I was wet and the temperature was dropping. I rummaged in the hold and found a lifejacket. There was nothing else to keep me warm, so I slipped that on.

The sea looked like glass. The air felt muffled. There was a pressing sensation on my eardrums. The vista seemed unreal, like the world had lost its third dimension.

I travelled for half an hour, land a distant smudge behind me, in front only emptiness. My thoughts strayed to the doctor, and whether he'd realise where I had gone.

A cold wind hit, seemingly from nowhere. The boat thudded on the white caps that sprang up, chivvying the hull, slowing my progress.

I crouched as low as I could and pressed my back against the stern. The warmth of the evening before was a distant memory, and I longed for the shelter of the doctor's quiet bay. Then came a feeling of relief. That is where I would take them – to the doctor. They would be safe there until I could negotiate their freedom. It never occurred to me that the doctor might not agree to harbouring fugitives.

Smiling, I tilted back my head and sniffed the cold salt spray. I felt a surge of happiness and hollered out loud into the wind, a tangle of yahoos and hurrahs. Everything was going to be alright.

Then the storm hit.

My first sense was of darkness. The sun fled the sky before the hunting wind, which howled about me. The water came at me in claws, flying at my face so I could not tell where the sea stopped and the air began. The swell grew bigger. The waves rose up, like landslides, rolling towards my tiny vessel. I pushed the tiller away as hard as I could, forcing the boat around to face the oncoming waves. One broadside could roll my vessel with the ease of a man tossing a peanut to his mouth.

As I topped each wave I scanned the sea for their boat, but I was alone. I called out, trying to hear my voice above the wind, but it whipped my words away before I could catch them. The tiller strained in my grip, wanting to turn with the waves, so I wrapped my whole body about it and pulled against the grasping sea, turning the prow into the wind again and again.

Up each wave we crawled, as if giant underwater hands, like monsters beneath the bed, had hold of the boat. They forced it up and up, against the laws of gravity, to a moment of terrifying vertigo when I surveyed the roller coaster below me, which disappeared into a fog of sea spray grey.

Down we plummeted in violent descent, my poor boat screaming as the wave raced beneath me, down into the darkness.

In the silent, windless trough the waves loomed up, monstrous whales, ready to crash upon me. I heaved on the tiller again to send us up to the black sky in hopeful ascendancy, only to face the inevitable slide down again. The brutal wind pierced my clothing and hammered my skin. Any sense of time was blown away and my life became measured, wave by wave.

All I could see was black, and my white arms wrapped around the brown of the tiller. I stared at my hands, numb with cold, like they were the hands of a stranger. I tried to make sense of them, these two small living things clinging so tightly to the piece of wood that was guiding my life.

I prayed that the storm would leave as quickly as it had arrived, blown away on the ferocious speed of its own wind, but this hope soon died.

Then voices started, coming to me on the wind, like lost souls crying from the darkness. I heard my own name called out with such longing that I called back. Behind me, I heard someone whispering for help and turned, searching in the water for a hand, a face.

As the boat crested the next wave I stood, trying to see who called my name, but the world gave way beneath me and I stumbled, letting go of the tiller. The sea snatched at its prize and the lifeboat turned broadside. We hung in mid-air, then my craft fell, tumbling down the wave, flinging me from its shelter.

I fell silently, not crying out for anyone to save me. I hit the water feet first, noticing how warm it seemed as I slid under. The waves closed over my head and the world went quiet. With the cessation of the screaming and banging I felt my body relax and I closed my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to sleep, a deep, peaceful sleep in the safety of the ocean's comforting depths.

But the lifejacket would not let me sink. It bore me to the surface, where I thrashed, trying to fight off the water, unable to tell whether it was the screaming wind or the smothering waves that choked my senses. I called out, straining to hear my voice above the sea, but the waves forced their way down my throat in fists and I gagged.

My hands hit something hard and real. I tried to kick away from whatever new monster the ocean was forcing upon me. Salt water blinded my eyes.

It came at me again.

It was my dinghy, upside-down. Despite the heaving water I managed to scramble onto its hull, dragging myself up on a rope that had become entangled about the boat. I twisted the rope around my arm and grabbed the keel, clinging to it more from instinct than any hope of survival. It was so dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes were open or closed. I wished I could return to the peace below the waves. In the dark my mouth latched onto the pain in my hand, sucking my knuckles for comfort, like a baby on its thumb.

The voices on the wind returned, but this time I thought it was my mother, whose voice I had never heard, calling me in from play.

‘I'm coming!' I cried back, although in reality it was only a whisper. I had to find her, I thought – I mustn't drown here in this storm, when my mother was so close. I fumbled in the panels of the lifejacket and wrenched out the flare, stored there by dry hands that could never imagine the circumstance of its use. Taking the ignition cord between my teeth I pulled, holding the flare above me like a beacon. The flame spluttered and grew, turning the sea blood red.

‘I'm here!' I cried out, louder this time, my voice rising above the wind, my dazzled eyes blinking blindly. ‘I'm here. Mother, I'm here.'

I thought I heard laughter and looked up to where the sky should be. But it was just another wave, roaring down upon me jaws agape, a beast charging. I held the flare out, trying to ward it off with fire. But it took me anyway, and I knew no more.

ESCAPE

It was the scent of the geranium petals that permeated his unconscious mind, seeping around the damage done by the policeman's baton, to beckon with a perfumed finger at the door of his memory.

‘My wife,' he said, with his eyes still closed, ‘likes to surprise me.'

He laughed and moved his head on the pillow, like he was talking to people around him. But the hospital room was empty.

He opened his eyes and saw the white handkerchief wrapping the flowers, the word ‘love' revealed from within its folds, and knew that he had been given another chance.

But straps held his arms to the bed. A policeman stood guard at the door.

He feigned unconsciousness and listened as the nurses moved to and fro, working around him, mentioning the woman in the next room. He let them grow familiar with his body, let them dare to loosen the restraints to move him. Lay doll-like as they washed him and turned him and dressed him again. Until they all went home and the night watch began.

The policeman had his back turned when the nurse undid the wrist-ties to change his soiled sheets. He didn't hit the nurse. He took the keys from the policeman's limp hand and locked the two in the room.

The woman looked peaceful as she lay in her hospital bed. He held the handkerchief to his face and inhaled the scent of flowers that still clung to it. He prayed that the girl wouldforgive them.

Through darkness they sailed in their stolen boat.

‘We are thieves' said she, roused from her unnatural sleep by the calling of careful seabirds, flying to the safety of the land that they were leaving. ‘How can we do this to her?'

‘We do what we must' replied the man and moved forward to trim the sail.

The dark water opened itself to their craft' like a cave revealed to the magic words of Ali Baba. To his urging the boat ran, finding a trail through the water to carry them to safety. It buoyed them with a traitor's unconcern for right and wrong' but with each mile gained his heart sank.

‘We are abandoning her,' said she, looking into the dawn without finding hope.

‘It is her world, not ours,' replied he, turning his head to fill his ears with wind, to blow out the whispers that agreed with her. But the wind vanished, and with a sailor's superstition he wondered if it had taken sides.

They waited, becalmed.

Then a storm dropped to earth behind them like a black cat, snapping at their tails as they ran blind before it.

A flash of lightning and he was in the war again, burrowed into his foxhole. Another flash and his leg burned with pain, old scars charged by the electricity in the air, reminding him that he could not escape.

‘Where is safety?' he said to himself as he ran forward to grapple a bucking sail to the deck. The clamour of its flapping reminded him of bombs and tanks, the sounds of war like an angry sea in his head.

‘Where is peace?' he called to the wind, to the darkness around them.

‘We cannot leave her,' said the woman, as he swung back into the cockpit, wishing her words were not sinking in.

‘Not again,' she reminded him, looking into his sad eyes.

He turned the boat about.

They chased the storm, following in its wake as it hunted over the open sea towards land. They sailed in silence, sliding down the rolling waves, which moved beneath them like onlookers hurrying to the scene of an accident. He loosened the main sail, whispering: ‘Not too fast, not too close' Fearing that the storm might catch their scent and turn.

She sat beside him, holding his free hand, her heart beating to remind her that she was alive again. She thought of the island they sailed towards and an image of blue skies like watercolours formed in her head; and warmth and chocolate and a way home and she smiled.

‘This is the right way' she said out loud. He nodded, and they sailed on.

The waves became steeper but they sailed on.

The waves became hills and valleys and they climbed them, moving ever forwards as they went back.

In the distance he saw a red light flash, but thought it an illusion of tired eyes. Their boat reached another crest and from this vantage point he saw the light again.

‘It's a distress flare' he said, pointing their bow towards it.

‘Can we reach it?' she asked, as they battled across the waves.

‘The storm will blow over' said her feeling the drag on the tiller grow less with each minute.

The boat they found was a dinghy, capsized' with a figure dangling from its hull by one arm. The body was small' just a girl.