The Crossing, page 17
At eleven she no longer knows how to distract herself. She pulls on her coastal jacket, steps down onto the pontoon, unplugs herself from the electrics, goes to the marina office to settle up, then comes back and begins to loosen her lines. In the textbooks of sailing, particularly the textbooks of short-handed sailing, the leaving of moorings—marinas, pontoons, harbour walls—is listed among those evolutions most likely to cause trouble. State of the wind, state of the tide, and all around her, packed tight, other people’s boats, some of them—most, perhaps—worth a great deal more than Lodestar. She frees all lines except the bow warp and the stern spring, puts both of these on a slip. She starts the engine, then goes forward and begins to pay out the bow warp. One of the men from the cutter calls, ‘Want a hand?’ but it’s too late for that. She slips the bow warp, hurries to the cockpit to put the engine in gear, slips the back spring, hauls it in and drops it in crazy loops round her feet.
‘Where’re you headed?’ calls the man, leaning over the stern rail of his beautiful boat.
‘West,’ calls Maud in return, and the man, if he has heard her at all, simply nods, raises an arm in farewell and turns away.
By the time the light is failing she’s mid-Channel and beating into wind and tide. She switches on the navigation lights; the Hydrovane is steering, the needle in the lit bowl of the binnacle floating over 235, 239, 237, 235.
During the first hours, moving south from the Lizard, the shipping was heavy; now it is quieter and her course should take her well clear of the lane around Ushant. Off her port bow a freighter is heading upchannel; to starboard, a pair of fishing boats are rolling in the swell fifty yards from each other. She is not sure if they are fishing, can see no black cones hoisted and they have not put on their lights yet. She watches them; she has been watching everything—seabirds, flotsam, the shifting light. Watching the boat, too; watching and listening.
Before it is properly dark she decides to go below and eat, use the heads, put on more clothes, prepare for the night. She has not, since her eggs at breakfast, eaten more than a few oatcakes. Her stomach is tender, her appetite less than it should be. It would be wise now to make a proper meal but she settles for a cereal bar, a mug of black tea, a couple of Kwells (less sleep-inducing than Stugeron).
Sitting on the leeward bench she strips down to her T-shirt then layers up, pulling clothes from the lockers beneath her. She puts on her salopettes, her coastal jacket, her sea boots. It is May and the wind is temperate but at some point in the night she will be cold. Fatigue will see to that.
A last mouthful of tea, then she goes to the companionway steps, pauses, reaches over and takes her phone from the mesh pocket above the chart table. It is not clear what has prompted this other than a fleeting thought about whether or not to wear her beanie and hearing in that thought something of Tim’s voice. She does not question it. Her hand reaching out is argument enough.
On deck she looks for shipping, checks the compass, the Hydrovane, then fits herself into the angle between the cabin and the edge of the cockpit and switches on the phone. The battery is down to about thirty per cent, and as Robert Currey did not install the inverter she will not be able to charge the phone at sea. There are two missed calls, both more than a week old. One number she recognizes immediately as the office in Reading; the other she has seen before but is less certain of. She thinks it is probably the police, perhaps the woman officer who came to the cottage, who waited with her in the churchyard.
There is only a single bar of reception—it flickers at the top of the screen like a faltering pulse—but she types in the number, listens to several seconds of hissing, then a ring tone that sounds unfamiliar, as if the call is being routed through a foreign exchange.
‘Tim’s phone,’ says a woman’s voice, brightly, and then, after a short pause, ‘Hello?’ and after a second pause, during which each perhaps can hear the other’s breathing, ‘Maud?’
Maud ends the call, powers down the phone, slides it into one of the deep pockets of her jacket. She had thought some automated voice might tell her she was out of range, that the number she was calling was unreachable. As for what she would have said if Tim had answered rather than Bella, she had nothing prepared. Told him where she was? How the boat was handling? That the green ribbon was still tied to the starboard shroud though the weather had washed and bleached it almost white? Or she could have simply held the phone out to the sea—even tossed it over the side to let him listen for a few seconds to whatever that sounded like, a phone sinking.
She imagines him asking Bella who it was, who called, and Bella saying, ‘I think it was Maud,’ and when asked what she had said, answering, ‘Nothing,’ and Tim saying, ‘Yes, that sounds like her.’
One of the steadiest patterns of their time together—in place from their earliest days—was a kind of call and response whereby Tim would ask her questions and she would answer them. As time went by her answers became less and less satisfactory to him. He had an expression that told her this—the unsmiling mouth, the eyes briefly widened. And certain phrases: ‘That’s it?’ ‘Yes . . . ?’ Even (something a teacher might have said to him at his school) ‘I’m waiting . . . ’
He said to her once, ‘Men complain all the time about women talking all the time. But I have the original silent woman.’
He described—more than once and each time with different emphasis—a cartoon he had seen in a magazine, or that someone had seen, Magnus perhaps: a caveman on the phone to his friend, the caveman’s wife standing in the background. ‘I’m thinking of teaching her to speak,’ says the caveman. ‘That can’t do any harm, can it?’
She thinks of the last time she saw him, his head on the pillow, his eyes turned away from her, his medicines on the table, the open book, the sound of the rain, the willows by the stream. And she remembers—it’s the stream itself that joins the two thoughts—the Boxing Day morning they all went out in boots and scarves to watch the hunt ride through, how they spotted them, still half a mile off, and watched them work their way down past the black hedges then zig-zag through empty fields until they were suddenly there, a hundred yards away, fifty yards, the horses big as cavalry horses, the master at the front in his faded coat, his face like bronze, raising the bone handle of his whip in salute . . .
The memory of it laid down in the moment like a rune in the soft matter of her brain.
On the VHF, after a burst of static, the Falmouth coastguard invites all mariners to switch to channel 79. She ducks her head below the hatch, dials in the new channel and hangs there, waiting.
Sunrise has no fanfare, just a cautious brightening, a hairline crack of gold bright enough to leave a line across the eye as you turn from it. The sea, that all night has simply been a sound, becomes again a particular set of distances, a thing she can study, that scatters under her gaze, that is both patterned and shapeless. She wonders if she has, for much of the last hour, been sleeping. The night, her memory of it, is not coherent. Lights that did not approach. The noise of a plane heading for France or some destination beyond. A shower of rain that lasted no more than a few minutes, that made the skin of her hands shine. A little later, the night unbroken still, the cautious calling of birds. Twice she went below to brew tea, roll a cigarette, use the heads, squint at the GPS. And there was a moment—before her last visit below? Afterwards?—when she felt she was falling and reached out urgently for something to hold on to only to find she was sitting, perfectly safe, in her wedge of cockpit, the boat riding forwards in easy sequences.
And now the dawn drifting towards her, small waves rising blue and silver out of the grey. She scans the horizon, climbs stiffly down the companionway steps, unzips her jacket and drops it on the leeward bench. The latest forecast from the Navtex is for force four, five by nightfall. No gale warnings, sea state moderate. She takes off her boots, her salopettes. She sets her alarm clock for thirty minutes, gets up into the berth. She’s on a port tack and the heel of the boat rolls her against the skin of the hull, the water’s infinite rhythms. She has never slept at sea before—not as a solo sailor—and for a while she fights it, the recklessness of it. Then sleep swallows her in the skip between instants, leaves her dreaming she is a woman alone on a boat too anxious to sleep. As if her sleeping head could think of nothing more fantastic.
When she opens her eyes again she knows from the light that the morning is well advanced and sits up so suddenly she hits her head and cries out, the first time she has heard her voice since speaking to the man on the cutter.
She goes on deck in her socks as though the seconds it would take to put on her boots might be the time she needed to avert a collision with the bow of a super-tanker, but when she stands in the cockpit the only vessel she can see, a good mile off her starboard beam, looks like a tall ship, a sail trainer perhaps, all sails set and heading west into the deep Atlantic.
For over two hours Lodestar has sailed unattended. Nothing has gone wrong. The course is good still, the sails sweetly curved, the boat balanced and making the best part of six knots through a low swell. There is even a hint of warmth in the wind, some promise of the light and air of the south.
Below again, she reads off her co-ordinates from the GPS, finds herself on the chart, then puts the kettle on the gimbaled burner and discovers her appetite is back. She scrambles three eggs, eats them on ham and bread, rolls a cigarette, smokes it in the cockpit, coils rope and sluices out the cockpit sole with a bucket of seawater. Then she goes forward to inspect the rigging, to look up the mast, to test the lashings on the little Bombard inflatable, check shackles, touch the sails. She kneels at the pulpit rail and looks down at the boat’s stern smashing the green tiles of the sea. She has been under way for not quite twenty-four hours but already a sense of pattern is emerging. The unspectacular doing of the necessary, the looking out, the tending, the slow ceasing of expectation. A hermit in her floating cell, a pilgrim, an exile, a woman out of a Book of Hours who works her life like a garden, who suffers in it if necessary, who rarely looks up.
In the late afternoon, clouds descend. For hours the world is grey and she has the company of silent grey birds. The sea is muffled. It’s not raining but somehow she still gets wet.
At ten, she fries up cabbage and caraway seeds, eats it out of the pan standing in the space between the galley stove and the companionway steps, the boat humming under her boots. She catnaps in the cockpit, her head lolling onto her chest, each short sleep with its brief luminous dream, each dream immediately forgotten as she wakes to the sound of wind and water.
At three in the morning she reaches the continental shelf, its contour lit by the lights of fishing boats, a great curve of them she cannot see the end of, a line running south and east towards Bilbao, north towards the coast of Ireland. She hears the fishermen’s voices on the VHF, alters course to sail between two of their boats, bracing herself to feel Lodestar caught suddenly in the hatchwork of a net. As she passes them, as she leaves them behind, the depth gauge in the cockpit shifts from a hundred metres to three hundred to five hundred then, going beyond what it can measure or display, the screen is suddenly blank.
When she can pick out the first signs of day she goes down to sleep, not in her berth—she is afraid she will not wake up—but on the leeward bench, her head on one of the little velvety cushions embroidered with the boat’s name that Tim’s mother gave them as a Christmas present the year after they bought the boat together. She sleeps for an hour, gets up to check the course, goes on deck to tack, comes down and sleeps a second hour on the other bench, the matching cushion.
The middle of the day is given over to repacking some of her store cupboards. The fresh food has already taken on a smell of boats, the inside of a boat. The radio is on, a test match at the Oval, the commentators passing sly remarks about each other’s clothes. Then a few minutes after six she sights her way marker, ODAS Brittany, spots it first with the naked eye—a black stick in the distance off the boat’s starboard shoulder—then finds it with the Zeiss, a black and yellow buoy with a ring of lights on top, the sea beyond it swept with shadow.
She marks her position on the chart—a dot within a circle. She makes a sandwich, makes coffee, puts a splash of rum in the coffee. The rum is to mark the relief she feels, the slight astonishment that she has found it, a buoy no bigger than a family car, upturned and tethered out here at the top of a cliff of green water. She carries her coffee up to the cockpit. The taste of the rum brings back the touch of the crane driver, the scent of him, certain things he said (perfecto, Cheers, Christ fuck). Brings back, too, how that night on the swinging mooring had become uncontainable, how (almost invisible to herself on the deck) she crept out of the harbour through the forming fog, and halfway to Fowey, below for a moment using the heads, found his sperm in the crease of her pants, the crease of herself, and thought what if? while deciding immediately and with whatever certainty she could muster in the face of such recklessness, that nothing of his would grow in her, could grow in her.
She is due to come on next week but won’t—the absence of those secret tides she hardly noticed until they were gone. She will be dry again, dry as stone, and this is another kind of silence, something in her like those shocked clocks found at the scene of a disaster, the hands stopped at the instant.
(The first time she bled her mother left at the end of her bed a roll of those bags you find in budget hotels and the toilets of aeroplanes for the disposal of what cannot be flushed. Also a newspaper article, laminated, about teenage girls getting pregnant, a picture of them sitting with their babies in some kind of day centre, smiling like those Flemish Madonnas in the old paintings where the frames are decorated with wildflowers.)
She sets a new course, a little to the west of the old one. Her next waypoint is a patch of water twenty nautical miles off the coast of Terceira in the Azores. She will only stop there—Terceira or Faial—if she needs to, if there’s some problem with the boat. Otherwise she will keep sailing, drop down to somewhere on a line with Senegal, then across to wherever it is she is heading, her destination . . .
To the man on the cutter she said simply ‘west’ but everything, approached, becomes specific, like it or not, and sooner or later west must take on a name, a set of co-ordinates. All those evenings at the yard and on the mooring, when she stayed up late with the charts walking the dividers across the sea like dowsing rods until, each time, they hesitated somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. She has ruled out the United States—she has no entry visa and does not want to try to explain herself to the Department of Homeland Security. Several times she has travelled to Fenniman HQ in Orlando and knows the US customs force is made up of young men fierce for category and that nothing she could say about her situation would fit between the narrow lines of any form they possessed (How many others like her? How many at any given time had purposes and business only really explicable through a medium like song?).
Cuba is possible, Cuba via Bermuda. Then work her way south to the Windward Islands. Or Mexico? She has not rejected Mexico. In the drawer at the back of the chart table she has the Book of Landfalls (a book as thick and heavy as her old textbooks of biology). She will find somewhere. She will not sail off the edge of the world. Cayo Largo, Ile-a-Vache, Montego Bay. She is most tempted by those places she fails most completely to imagine. For example, a place called Progreso on the Yucatan coastline where nothing else seems to exist, nothing the Admiralty thought worth depicting. A dot on the mustard yellow the chart uses to distinguish the land from the sea. A dot, and beside it a blot of purple to indicate a light. Some manner of settlement off the waters of the Campeche Bank. A place whose ambition for itself she could not begin to guess at.
Day after day, the tasks she allots to herself, the little cleaning jobs, the meals taken standing up by the galley. Nights under the waxing moon, silver wake, green phosphorescence. Sleeping for an hour, for half an hour, waking to the same scene her eyes closed to.
She wears shorts and a shirt now, bare feet growing brown and bruised. Hair lightening, face darkening. Little cracks, salt-sores, on the skin of her hands.
In the early hours of her tenth night at sea the boat wakes her with a new angle, a new noise. There’s a front passing overhead and she goes on deck, one hand fumbling with the zip of her jacket, one hand clutching at the shadows around her. In the cockpit she pulls up her hood only to have it immediately blown down again. There is no sense of the boat struggling, but after watching it a while, the bows thudding into the swell, her face becoming streaked with drifts of seawater, she furls the jib to roughly half its full surface then struggles into her harness, clips on, and goes to the mast to free the main halyard and drops two reefs’ worth of mainsail into the lazy jacks. The boat slows, quietens. In daylight she might have left it to sail hard but it’s half four in the morning and she wants to get below again.
There are no lights visible other than her own. She has not seen a ship for forty-eight hours. As she passes the depth gauge she flashes her torch beam at it, wipes away the moisture with her thumb. It’s blank, of course, but she knows from the chart there’s more than five thousand metres of water beneath her.
She is sailing an average of ninety nautical miles a day, noon to noon. When she closes her eyes she sees only the sea, its ceaseless motion, neither rough nor quiet, neither away from nor towards, a view unburdened with anything resembling meaning.
Forty degrees north, twenty-four west. She is, she judges, a day and a half from the island of Terceira. In the late morning she is sitting, smoking in the lee of the mast, when a plume of feathering water rises, thirty, forty metres from the boat. A slick back appears, a fin, then just a patch of seething water, settling. She stands, one hand gripping the mast, her gaze sweeping the surface of the sea. And there it is again! Ten metres closer, a noise like the steam whistle of a drowned factory, the high plume dispersing, the great back rolling. Two of them, she thinks, two at least. If one rises under the boat then the boat is finished. She glances at the life raft in its orange canister, picmres the crash bag beside her berth. Do they know she’s here? Can they hear the boat, see it?
