Zombies: The Recent Dead (24 page)

Steve Duffy

It was a night trip, and the thing to remember is: no one’s looking for surprises on a night trip. You ride at anchor, out where it’s nice and quiet; kick back, chill out, talk rubbish till sunup. No surprises.

Back when Danny had the
Katie Mae
, we often used to take her out of Beuno’s Cove at ten, eleven
pm
, and head for the banks off Puffin Island, near the southeast tip of Anglesey;
we
being Danny, who owned the boat, Jack, who crewed on a regular basis, and me. Jack was a great big grinning party-monster who’d do anything for anyone; anything, that is, except resist temptation when it offered itself, as it seemed to on a regular basis. Any other owner but Danny would probably have sacked him, no matter how good he was with boats: the reason Danny didn’t would never have been clear to an outsider, really. Claire, who was always quick to pick up on that sort of thing, reckoned that Jack—Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky—represented something that Danny—Mr. Plodder—had probably always dreamed of being himself, but had never quite worked up the nerve to go for. It was a classic case of vicarious wish-fulfilment, apparently.

“And I’ll tell you something else about Danny,” she’d added, “I bet once you get past that Big-I-Am act he puts on, it’s Jack who does all the hard grafting—am I right? It’s the same with you: if you didn’t sort out all his tax returns and VAT for him, they’d probably have taken that boat off him by now. He likes to think he’s running the show, but he’d be sunk without the pair of you. It’s quite funny, really.” I remember her whispering all this in my ear as we watched Jack and Danny playing pool in the basement bar of the Toad Hall, not long after we’d first started dating.

That was the summer of ’95: on dry land it was banging, hammering heat wave all the way, long sun-drenched days and sticky muggy nighttimes. Out at sea, though, you got the breeze, cool and wonderful, and whenever the next day’s bookings sheet was blank Danny needed little enough persuading to pick up a tray or two of Red Stripe and take the
Katie Mae
out for the night. Jack would turn up with a bag of Bangor hydroponic and we’d make the run out to the fishing banks west of the Conwy estuary; we’d lie out on the deck drinking, smoking, chatting about nothing in particular, or maybe go below to pursue the Great and Never-Ending Backgammon Marathon, in which stupendous, entirely fictional sums of money would change hands over the course of a season’s fishing. Good times; easy, untroubled. I look back now and think how sweet we had it then.

One night in early August Claire said she wanted to go out with us. I can’t really say why I was resistant to the idea. Part of it, if I’m honest, was probably to do with keeping her well away from Jack until I was a bit more confident in the relationship. Remember I told you about Jack and temptation? Well, if I’d gone on to mention me and insecurity, that would’ve given you the whole of the picture. Over and above that . . . I honestly don’t know. Nothing like a premonition, nothing that dramatic or well-defined. Just the feeling, somewhere under my scalp, that things might be on the cusp; might be changing, one way or another, and changing irrevocably. The fact was I always made an excuse, put her off; until that particular night when it had all the potential to turn into an argument, which would have been our first. Fine, I said, yeah, come along, no problem.

It had been another scorcher. Walking down the hill to the harbor you could feel the pavement underfoot giving out the last of the day’s heat to the baking breathless night; under the cotton of her tee-shirt the small of Claire’s back was slick with sweat where my hand rested. Danny was waiting for us on the
Katie Mae
, and Jack came by soon after; he’d been away for the weekend at a festival, got back only that morning, slept till nine
pm
, and now here he was ready for action again, invincible. It was just gone half-eleven when we fired up the engine and cast off; I remember Claire squeezed my hand in excitement.

The last of the sunset was gone out of the sky, and it was very dark, very quiet, a still, calm night with just a sliver of the waning moon swinging round behind the headland. The beacon winked one, two, three as we eased out beyond the end of the breakwater, Claire and I sitting out on the foredeck, Danny and Jack in the wheelhouse. As always when we were putting out on a night trip, I felt that little kick of expectation: I’d get it in the daytime, too, but at night particularly. There was a magic to it, some song of the sea, pitched between shanties and sirens. “It’s the ocean, innit?” Jack once said; “you never know what it’s going to throw at you,” and soon enough I learned this to be true. Tongue in cheek, I told the same thing to Claire as we rounded the Trwyn y Ddraig and pulled away from the coast.

“Listen, I don’t care what it throws at me,” she said, arching like a cat in the first stirrings of a sea-breeze, “just so long as it’s this temperature or below. Oh, that’s good. That’s the coolest I’ve been all day.” She stretched out on the foredeck, head propped up in my lap as I sat cross-legged behind her, absently ruffling her hair with my fingers.

At this stage you probably need to know a bit about the layout of the boat. The
Katie Mae
was thirteen meters stem-to-stern, pretty roomy for a standard fishing vessel, with reasonably poky diesels (in need of an overhaul, but fine so long as you didn’t try and race them straight from cold). The wheelhouse was amidships, the centre of the boat; behind that, on the aft deck, were the gear lockers, the bilge pump, the engine hatch. Up towards the stem, there was the foredeck and the Samson post. In the wheelhouse we had VHF ship-to-shore, GPS, radar, and also the “fish-finder,” the sonar that not only showed the sea-bottom but tracked the shoals. Down below, bench seats followed the shape of the hull for’ard of the wheelhouse above, curving with the prow around a drop-down table where we kept the beer and the backgammon set. Hurricane lights hung from the bulkheads between the portholes, posters of mermaids were tacked up on the ceiling: all snug as a bug in a rug. And outside, where Claire and I were, you had the best air-conditioning in all North Wales, entirely free and gratis.

Claire snuggled her head in my lap, enjoying the cool breeze of our passage. “This is nice,” she said, letting the last word stretch to its full extent. “Just like you to keep it all to yourself—typical greedy pig bloke.”

I dodged her playful backward punches, one for every slur. “Keep what to myself? A bunch of sweaty geezers sitting round getting smashed and talking garbage all night? You should’ve said—I’d have taken you down the rugby club, back in town.”

“Getting smashed and talking garbage? Is that all there is to it? It’s got to be a bit more cerebral than that, surely—big smart boys like you, university types and all?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Danny had joined us on the foredeck. “Well, you’d be wrong. No culture on this here tub.”

“If it’s culture you want,” I pointed out, moving over to make room, “I believe P&O do some very nice cruises this time of year.”

“Do you want the guided tour then, Claire?” Danny settled himself alongside us. That’s Llandudno—see the lights round the West Shore?—and that’s the marina at Deganwy over there.”

Not to be outdone, I chipped in my own bit of local color. “This stretch here is where the lost land of Helig used to be, before the sea came in and covered it all.”

“Helig ap Glannog, aye,” Danny amplified in his amusingly nit-picking way, at pains to remind Claire just who was the captain on this boat, and who was the guy who helped out now and then. Danny’s dad had fished these waters since the 1940s; he’d been delighted when his eldest dropped out of Bangor Uni and picked up a charter boat of his own. Since then, Danny had been busy proving Jack’s adage that you could take the boy out of university, but you couldn’t take university out of the boy. It was just a way he had. You couldn’t let it get to you.

“Helig ap what?” Claire seemed slightly amused herself—remember, I told you she’d already got Danny figured out.

“Way back,” Danny explained, “sixth century AD. There was a curse on the family, and a big tide came and covered all their lands, and everybody died except for one harpist on the hill there crying woe is me, woe is me, some shit or other. And nowadays hardly anyone moors a boat out there—”

“Except for Danny,” I chipped in, “because he’s big and hard and don’t take no shit from no one, innit, Danny lad?” He tried to punch me in a painful place, but I rolled over just in time. “Who’s steering this tub, anyway?”

“Jack,” said Danny, waiting till I’d resumed my former position before trying, and failing once more, to hit me where it hurt. “We’ll keep going for a bit,” he went on, ignoring my stifled laughter, “till we’re out of everyone’s way. Then we’ll drop anchor and get down to business.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the night’s entertainment. “So, do you play backgammon then, Claire?”

Claire smiled sweetly, her blond hair blowing back into my face. “Well, I know the rules,” she said, and nudged me surreptitiously.

Several hours later, Claire owned, in theory at least, the
Katie Mae
, the papers on Danny’s house and fifty percent of both Jack’s and mine earnings through to the year 2015. Down below Danny and Jack were skinning up and arguing over who was most in debt to who; Claire and I were up in the wheelhouse, enjoying a little quality relationship time with the lights out.

“Mmmm,” she said, into my left ear. “That was easy enough.”

“What?” I said. “Me? I’m dead easy, me. You should know that by now.”

“Oh, I do,” she said, “I do. No—I meant those two downstairs.”

“
Down below
,” I reminded her, in Danny’s pedantic voice. “What—you mean you get up to this sort of thing with those two as well? I’m crushed.”

She chuckled, and moved her hand a little. “There—is that better? Didn’t mean to crush you. Are they always that dozy?”

“Well, you had an unfair advantage.”

“What?”

“You were distracting them all the time.”

“Me? What was I doing?”

“Nothing,” I said, burying my face in her neck. “You were just making the most of your natural advantages: this, and this, and this . . . ”

“Mmmm . . . ooh. What’s that?”

“You mean you don’t know what
that
is? Here, let me show you—”

“Not that.” Firmly, she brushed the possibility aside. “That thing behind you. It’s beeping.”

“Beeping . . . ?” I disengaged myself awkwardly and looked around. “Oh, that. That’s the fish-finder. Didn’t think it was me.”

“The whatter?”

“Fish-finder: it’s sonar, like in the movies, ping-ping, ping-ping? It shows you the sea-bed underneath the vessel—down here, look—and then where the shoals are. Look, there’s something: that blob there, coming up now.”

“So is that fish, then?” There was another ping. The target was rising, moving closer to the boat, so far as I could tell. Or it could have been the boat was sinking, I wasn’t an expert.

“Must be, I suppose. Hang on, Jack knows this kit better than I do—Jack?”

Jack’s grinning head popped up from below: the original Jack-in-the-box. “Aye, aye, mateys—here you go, I’ve done up a little dragon each for you, all classy-like.” He swarmed up the short companionway to join us in the wheelhouse. “Hell’s teeth, now, what’s this?” He flipped a switch up and down on the fish-finder. “Have you been pressing buttons again, Billy-thick-lad? Bloody cabin boys, Claire, I tell you—”

I dug him in the ribs, and we wrestled amiably for a moment. “It’s nothing to do with me, that—I never touched it. It just went off.”

“I see. Big boy done it and ran off, is that it?” He smiled at Claire. “No, you’re in the clear for once. I’ll tell you who’ll have left this on—bloody Captain Birdseye down there. You can’t trust him to do anything properly: That right, Will?”

From down below came a smothered counter-accusation: Jack showed it his middle finger and grinned again, even more roguishly. I put an arm around Claire, just so’s Jack didn’t get carried away. “Claire wants to know is that a shoal or what?”

“Let’s have a butcher’s . . . what, that there? No, that’s not a shoal.” He bent over the screen. In its faint green glow he looked a little perplexed. “Too small, see? And it’s right up on the surface, practically—I don’t know what that is. Sometimes you get seals round Puffin Island, off the Orme even . . . I dunno. It might be a seal, I suppose.” He glanced up, through the cabin window. “There isn’t any moon, worse luck, but if we look over, lemme see . . . 
that
way—” he pointed out on the starboard side—“we might be able to see something, if we get out on deck and stay quiet-like.”

Which we did, joined by Danny, who’d just appeared from below decks with more beer; and perhaps I should mention at this point that Claire and I had only had a couple of cans each by that time. I’d been hitting on the majority of the joints as they went round, Claire hadn’t, but we were both completely on the case so far as our shared perceptions went. Given what happened over the next hour or so, it’s important you know that.

Out on the aft deck, Jack explained to Danny what we’d seen on the fish-finder. We were all of us whispering, in case we scared the seal; we were still expecting seals at this point. Danny nodded, and pottered over behind the wheelhouse on the port side. Claire cupped her hand around my ear and whispered, “What’s he up to?” At that time I didn’t know. Soon enough it would become clear.

The three of us on the aft deck—Jack, Claire and I—gazed out over the waves. It was difficult to make much out on the surface, even with the light in the wheelhouse switched off and our eyes accustomed to the darkness. Away off in the far distance was a glitter of shore-lights: Anglesey to the north-west, Penhirion and the mainland south-west. Between the lights on land and where we lay at anchor was mile after mile of still dark ocean. The green navigation light danced on the tops of the soft sluicing wavelets near the hull; all the rest was a vast murky undulation, slop and ebb, slop and ebb, featureless, unknowable.