The storm caught us just off Hartland Point, blew us halfway to
Milford Haven.
In honesty, I thought it was a blessing.
You can shake a new crew down, just with a regular cruise: show them the ropes, help them learn about the sea, the ship, the world and each other. For a real shakedown, though, there’s nothing better than a crisis; and there is no crisis like a real storm. I’d bottle one if I could, manufacture one if I had any gift in that direction. Storm strips you down to the bone, it takes away your choices. All you’ve got is what you are, is what you can offer to your crewmates.
My crew that trip was half a dozen gap-year students, filling in time. Nice kids. In the ordinary way of things they would have fallen in and out of love and in and out of bed, sulked and broken things and glued things back together again, talked and talked. Over a week or ten days they’d have shaken down into a decent crew, bar maybe the one who couldn’t take it, who would have left in tears at the next convenient port.
They didn’t get the ordinary way of things. What they got instead was a hard blow out of the south-west, seas like plough-hills, rain like they’d never seen it. What I got was memories of Fastnet in ’79, the last thing I was looking for in these waters—and a sudden, unexpected crew, where they’d been a bunch of strangers just before. They were sodden and seasick and scared, desperately sorry for themselves and utterly out of their depths; but they worked like Trojans regardless, and took care of each other. The first time I saw a girl swear viciously at a lad for not clipping on his safety harness before he stuck his head out of a hatch to throw up, I knew they’d be all right.
Myself I’d never had any doubts about, nor the ship either. Kids are more susceptible: inexperience and bravado make a cocktail with hormones that doesn’t always mix well in a storm. I’ve seen youngsters go over the side, foolhardy or unlucky, tempting fate either way.
Not these. On this ship, with me to watch them, they should have been safe anyway; if they had sense enough to watch each other, I could stop worrying.
I watched them anyway, of course, and drove them hard. When the storm finally blew over their reward was a slug of rum in their tea, and a reprieve. “This one night,” I said, “I’ll stand watch alone. Me and my electronics, that is, you’re never alone with a GPS. You go below, find yourselves a dry bunk, get some sleep. You’ve earned it. In the morning, we’ll see what’s what.”
Morning dawned clear and still, no sign of land on any horizon. One by one the kids came up on deck, sweaters and jeans, hands wrapped around mugs, woken by strangeness: voices or seagulls or the swell beneath the hull, something. They were sore and sleepy and deeply, unutterably pleased with themselves. It might have been their first taste of survivor’s relish, that understanding that they could have died last night and didn’t.
They strewed themselves about the foredeck, all eyes turned beyond the bow. I gave them five minutes to realise that we weren’t actually moving in that direction, that the muted thunder of the engine was absent from the day and maybe after all it had been the silence that disturbed them, the loss of forward motion, something; then I left the wheelhouse and went to join them.
“Okay, here’s the situation. The motor’s out. Seawater in the fuel lines, maybe, or something more serious. I won’t know till I take it apart. I’ve told the coastguard we’re adrift, but not to worry: we’ve plenty of searoom, and we’ll be back up and running soon enough. I need two of you to keep watch, just on general principles, but no one’s coming anywhere near us; everyone has radio, everyone has radar, they all know where we are. Two more come down with me and I’ll show you the inside of a diesel. The last couple makes a start on sorting out the bookroom, it’s an unholy mess in there. Shuffle yourselves into pairs, if you haven’t already; duties change every two hours. Everyone does everything. Clear?”
One small voice said, “What about breakfast?”
“Everyone does everything,” I said, “bar the cooking. I cook. Once I know what’s going on in the engine. If you can’t last that long, there are cereal bars in the galley.”
Who was it said he didn’t envy the heart of youth, but only its head and stomach? Last night they’d been as sick as dogs, whenever they stopped to think about it. This morning they engulfed a vat of porridge so quickly, I made cheese butties to follow. And carried them around from one watch to the next: up to the wheelhouse, down to the engine-room, lastly to the bookroom where my heart lay and my business too.
Orcas was an old retired ferryboat. She used to ply between the northern isles, carrying cars and cattle, tourists and teenagers, bread and bricks and broadcloth. Now she was mine, and I’d refitted her; she carried books.
Books and seawater don’t mix. I’d done everything I could to keep the boat tight and the cargo dry; I stowed the books in sealed crates and strapped everything down, and even so. The old passenger lounge was what I called my bookroom, and the floor was awash. Half the crates had come adrift of their strapping, as last night’s seas tossed my poor boat about. I didn’t know yet whether the sea had found its way inside the crates. The shelving was all steel and all bolted to the walls, but even that had taken damage: from flying crates, I thought, more than surging seawater.
There was mopping to be done all through the ship; there were soggy seabags to be carried out on deck, to dry off in the sun; but the bookroom mattered most. I had the kids set up trestle tables and inspect boxes one by one, laying damp or battered books to one side and sorting as they went. Learning the inventory.
“All this lot’s new stock,” I said, “picked up over the last month, when I was on my own, that I haven’t had time to go through yet. I don’t know what’s here.”
“Can you really manage this whole thing alone?” Kelly was wide-eyed; if I had any interest in impressing eighteen-year-olds, she was ripe for it.
“If I have to,” I said, “I can. I’d sooner have a crew—well, you saw, last night. Sometimes I need you. On my own, I hug the coast and put into port at the first sign of weather. Actually, I mostly just go from port to port anyway. Orcas was built for sea, but yesterday’s cruise was meant to be a treat, for her as much as the rest of us. Sorry ’bout that.”
“Nah, it was fun,” Luke said stoutly. He’d been the one throwing up through the hatch—nice boy, didn’t want to do it inside—and she’d been the one who yelled at him. I try not to jump to conclusions, but—well, kids aren’t so careful. I thought they’d probably be jumping each other’s bones by the end of the week, if they weren’t already.
“So do you just buy everything that people bring you?” Kelly asked.
“More or less. If it’s a boxful, absolutely. You never know what you might find lurking at the bottom of a box. Real treasures, sometimes.”
“You must have to wade through a lot of trash, though.”
I shrugged. “Every book has its natural home, its proper reader. Even the ones you think are trash. It’s my job to find that reader, and bring the two together.”
“Isn’t that what the internet’s for?” Luke asked, picking disdainfully through a dozen ancient Zane Grey paperbacks.
“Sure—and I do trade online. But a lot of readers are still old-fashioned, they like the thrill of the chase, hunting through shelves of physical books. And when the bookshop is a boat, when it’s only in town for a week, that adds to the allure. I do better business over the counter than I do over the net.” As he’d find out soon enough. A couple of days hauling books around, he’d be more sore than he was after a night of storm. It wasn’t sailing the boat I really needed a crew for, it was days in port.
“Hey, look, Martin—is this something?”
From under a pile of Jackie Collins and John le Carré hardcovers came a familiar shape, with a familiar heft to it. I could practically taste the dust already on my tongue. A foot high, four inches thick, heavily gilded and embossed: Kelly looked so excited I had to bite back the groan it wanted to drag out of me.
“That’s a family Bible,” I said. “Victorian. I don’t even need to open it. Someone’s found it in their attic, and they’re just like you: they think age must equal value. It’s not true. Sorry, but they’re practically ten a penny. There are plenty around, and no one wants them.”
“You said every book has its natural home.”
“I did, yes—and that one belongs in the house it’s just come from, or else to the family that used to live there. Open it up, it’ll list the paterfamilias and all his descendants unto the third generation, in a lovely copperplate hand. If we could find them, the current generation, they might want it—but their forebears left it behind, remember. As genealogy it’s not so much an avenue as a dead end.”
She made a face, but put the book on one side carefully. As soon as I was gone, I knew, she’d be at it with a J-cloth for the dust, opening it up to find the former owners. Tonight no doubt she’d be full of intrigue over dinner, wondering who they were and where they’d gone, using her smartphone to Google names, getting excited all over again at the inevitable hits.
Hey-ho. I shrugged and went back down to my engine, where it lay in bits and diesel baths with anxious children trying to diagnose it.
I couldn’t say quite what brought me up again, before we were half done down there. It can’t have been the weigh that was on us, the slow momentum of the tidal drift; that hadn’t changed. It oughtn’t to be the quality of the silence, isolated as we were down in the engine-room. Uncounted years at sea give you an instinct, that’s all: not for trouble, but for the conditions that can cause it. Sometimes that means a change in wind or weather; sometimes it’s more subtle.
I left Scott and Michelle greasy and determined; I all but ran up the companionway, wiping my hands on a rag as I went.
And came out on deck, into a world of white and hush and stillness: that same feeling that in childhood fantasy Christmas is a thrill, because it means the snow has come, but at sea is always a dire warning, because what it means is fog. Fog without power.
It ought never to be a surprise in those waters, but it always is. It ought always to be a terror, in any waters. Fog banks have a natural affinity to rocks and sand banks; also to busy shipping channels, giant tankers running fast and heedless.
Orcas has a fog-horn. Of course she does, wise old boat. She might not have lived so long without.
I ran up to the wheelhouse, and punched the button that sent our presence blaring out, every thirty seconds. Nothing that was likely to harm us was likely to hear it, but you do what you can. It would make the kids feel better, that at least, and morale is always a factor.
I didn’t clip Jason and Penny around the ear and demand to know why they hadn’t called for me, the instant the fog showed. That could wait.
More importantly, I called the coastguard.
Tried to. Being adrift in known waters is one thing; being adrift in fog is something else.
Being adrift in fog with all your electronics dead? Something else again.
Radio, radar, GPS. Nothing.
“Okay,” I said, sounding positive, robust for the kids’ sake. They really didn’t need to know that this was their second crisis, hot on the heels of the first. “We’ll do this the old-fashioned way. One of you in the bows, please, one in the stern. I’m sorry to split you up; I’ll dig out walkie-talkies if your phones don’t have a signal, but I need a watch both ends. Take these,” their compensation, a flare-gun each, “and fire one off if you see anything moving, any shadow in the fog. I’d rather waste a dozen flares than hit a ship unknowing. Or have a ship hit us.”
I made sure the youngsters were settled, each with their exciting guns. I tested their cellphones myself—and no, no signal: no way to call the coastguard, something more than fog had closed in on us—and promised them the walkie-talkies when I had time, so that they could at least chat to each other, keep themselves alert. Then I went below just for a minute, to let everyone know the position.
And down on the deck below the wheelhouse, just at the hatch to the companionway where the fog had drifted and clumped together, just as I stepped through the bulkhead, just there—
Well. I stepped between two silent figures, shadows in the fog, standing like sentinels one either side of the hatchway.
A man and a boy, I thought they were. A child.
Colder than glass, I thought they were. Cold as the deep water, down where light never reaches.
I stopped dead. And despised myself for doing it, for standing there so utterly still, bereft; and even as I forced myself back into motion I was thinking that someone had stopped them even deader, dead indeed.
And then as I turned in the hatchway there to find them, I was thinking no, don’t be a fool, that’s just the fog in your brain, thinking for you. Thinking fogthoughts. There are no boys aboard, except the crew. Big boys. This is a boy and a girl, that’s all: she’ll be the short one, Kelly. The two of them come up together in search of you, fog-bound and frightened, mute, waiting for reassurance…
And I was ready almost to offer it, robust and practical—except that they weren’t there. No crew, and no stiff silent figures like guardians at the door.
Instead, there was a woman: middle-aged, none of mine. Nothing that belonged here. Plunging at me through the physical air, entirely physical herself, entirely ruined: monochrome in foglight, blood like black ink flooding her face, soaking the white of her long dress, nightgown, wedding gown, whatever it was that she wore.
Just that glimpse, that moment. Then a gust of wind tore at the fog and she was gone, ripped away from me before I could stir to help her.
I clung to the frame of the hatchway, both hands, just for a moment, just to hold myself upright.
The sea is…a liminal space, vast but marginal, the ground between. Between one state and another, in any sense you like to use those words. Liquid, again in any sense. A boat is a bridge, always. No one actually goes to sea, we go to Rio de Janeiro or Surabaya or Hong Kong; the sea is only what we have to straddle between here and there, a condition we have to pass through. Quarantine.
They call me Sailor Martin, and even so. I use the sea, I don’t belong to it.
It took me a while to understand that, and no one else believes it. Never mind.
The sea does have its people, of course, those it’s claimed. Lost souls, and many of them: and yes, you may see them in the fog, hear them in the wind. Meet them, perhaps, if you’re not lucky. But they’re…diffuse. Dissolved. Diluted. Not like this.
I took a moment, took a breath. Turned again, and went below.
Needed more than a moment, apparently, more than a breath. Didn’t go to the engine-room, nor the bookroom either.
Went to the galley, and started cutting bread. Put a pan of milk on to heat. It’s a default position for me: when in doubt, make cocoa, make sandwiches. Feed the crew. Lunch is always the good news.
I bore gifts and tidings, then, to my oily workers, and then to my dusty ones.
“Beef and horseradish,” I said, when Kelly asked.
She took her hand away. “I’m vegetarian.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “Not here, not now. Food counts for more than principles. What if we had to eat the cabin boy?”
“You can eat the cabin girl instead,” she said mulishly. “I’d volunteer.”
“Luke’s bigger,” I said. “He’d go further. You’d barely make a mouthful, and then we’d have to eat someone else.”
It’s not my reputation, but I can be kind. I set that up deliberately to give him the chance to prod her slender parts and observe there was no meat on her, to win himself a fist in the ribs and a quick wrestle, a relief of tension all round.
When they subsided, I nodded towards one of the tables, where that family Bible lay predictably open. “Been reading through their begats, have you, Kelly?”
“Oh—yes.” She pulled a face, seeming not to notice that Luke had carelessly left his arm lying across her shoulders. “I don’t like it much.”
“Why not?” That was unexpected, and useful: another distraction. Sometimes with a new crew you have to stop them thinking, or they’ll worry themselves into paralysis.
When she came to show me, she tugged Luke behind her by the finger. Just to have him there, apparently, to lean into as she said, “Look. One of his daughters must have blotted her copybook.”
Indeed. She’d been more than blotted, she’d been expunged: her name utterly blacked out, ink deliberately dribbled onto the paper and the surface scratched with a pen-nib to help it soak through.
I thought of her plunging through fog, sodden with disaster, nameless and lost, unsalvageable.
“What could she have done,” Kelly asked, “to deserve that?”
I shrugged. “Elopement, pregnancy. Refusal to marry where her father said she must. That’s the tradition, it’s usually something to do with the line of inheritance. The selfish gene. Unless she went mad and murdered her maiden aunt. Burned down the stable. Sold the family jewels and ran off to Australia. Something. Drink your cocoa before it skins.”
I still thought it would have been something to do with her person. Personal.
“How are the dilithium crystals, Scotty?”
It was, of course, irresistible. He gave me one of those weary obliging grins that say this joke is very old indeed; he humoured me with a mumble about how they couldn’t take it, Captain, and could we all please be beamed out of this?—and then he offered his actual opinion, that he didn’t know diesels from Adam but he couldn’t see that we’d done anything at all, just taking the damn thing apart and putting it together again.
“It’s like a hard reboot,” I said. “Seawater gets where it shouldn’t, or a bubble of air, fog in the system. You don’t see it because there’s nothing there to see, but you shift it anyway. Maybe. If we’re lucky. Who wants to press the magic button and find out?”
Scott deferred to Michelle, only because he thought he ought to; you could see that he really wanted to do it himself.
She could see that. She smiled, shook her head, gestured to get on with it.
Which he would have done, his hand was halfway there and he was just glancing to me for confirmation—turn this, press that, hold it down, right?—when we were interrupted.
A scream through fog and steel comes muffled, but it does still come.
It was hoarse and horrified, and male. I was running before they had their wits together to follow me; I was halfway up the companionway when I heard the bang of a flare going off.
I got there first, because of that head start. Jason was standing backed up against the rail, shaking, shying at the sight of me, fumbling to reload the flaregun. I took that off him first thing, before I peeled him away from the rail and led him somewhere safer, into the anxious clutches of the others as they came.
“What happened, Jason?”
“I,” he said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have fired, I know it’s not—”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I told you, I’d rather waste a dozen flares than miss something that mattered. What was it?”
“I saw…I saw something. Someone. A man. I think it was a man…”
My crew might be bewildered, but not me so much. Not now. I might have let him stop there, but the young are less generous; he provoked a chorus of questions, because they all think it’s always better to talk everything through. Better out than in, they say. It isn’t true.
He said it again, “I think it was a man. How can you tell, when their face has been all cut away? He was…all blood, all over. Flesh and blood. No skin…”
The kids gazed at him, gazed at each other and at the empty deck, turned at last to me. I said, “Okay, you’re all off duty for a bit. We’ll take a chance on some tanker running us down. Get yourselves down to the galley and find the rum. You can have a tot each. Just the one, mind.”
“There’s more space in the bookroom,” someone said.
“No,” I said flatly. “Not there. Take Jason to the galley.” They’d pack in close and warm, and I’d know where they all were. Safety in numbers.
Me, I was going to the bookroom. Alone.
What’s the opposite of safety in numbers?
Ah, yes. Stupidity.
You can make what jokes you like about L-space and the inter-connectedness of all libraries. It’s still true, and it’s still not funny. The sea is liminal, and so is fog—and so are books. It’s only that books are more fixed, more focused. They still constitute a marginal land, gateways and fences, boundaries to breach.
A boat is a bridge, and so is a book. It’s meant to stand between writer and reader, to bring them close to touching: to have them march in step a little way together, almost hand in hand, nothing between them but an unloved wall.
But a book is an object too, as well as a journey people take together.
It can be all too physically a bridge. Where the sea dilutes, a book can concentrate. There’s power in the written word, power in a pen—and any book can be written in, by anyone.
I came down into the bookroom, into the sound of muttered voices, into an empty space.
There were footsteps at my back, but none of the kids was coming after me.
I went to the porthole first, undogged it, flung it wide to let the chill fog in. Then I went back to the table where the Bible lay open to that family tree, laid out I thought for sacrifice.
It was no surprise to see the name of the paterfamilias was gone. Not inked out this time, no. Cut away, rather: scraped off the heavy paper with a blade, a razor. Skinned.
There were still a dozen names remaining, children and grandchildren, generations long gone and yet to suffer. I wasn’t having that, not on my boat.
When I reached to close the book, to lift it: that’s when he spoke to me, a voice like bitter wire in my bones, that deep inside me. That cold, that vicious. That deadly.
“Don’t you touch that. Let it lie.”
He was too late, I was touching it already. Perhaps I leaned some weight on it; perhaps it only needed a touch, some books are like that, all too ready to turn.
It had been propped, but the spine fell flat beneath my hand and all the pages flipped so that I was looking at the endpapers suddenly, the back of the book.
At two more names written in a round, careful, difficult hand: Elias Munstrum, marked with a cross, and Joshua his son. Joshua who had been to the board school, as I guessed, for long enough to learn to write his own name and his father’s, that at least.
I didn’t know who they were, or how they stood to the family. Servants, tenants? Something. It didn’t matter.
I stepped around the table and looked up and there they stood in the doorway, in my boat: father and son, man and boy. The one with an open cut-throat razor in his hand, the other with a pen.
“You let that lie,” the father said again, “you don’t touch that.”
A book is a bridge, and they were using this one, in the fear, in the fog.
A book is a gateway, and we had opened it.
My hand was still on it, to prove the father wrong.
His razor was still in his hand. Absurdly, I was almost more frightened of his son, the silent boy dressed like a model of his father in his Sunday black, with his feet bare and that cheap pen clutched tight, steel nib ready to scratch and scratch.
The cold was everywhere, was everything. It came from them, from the book, from the open port.
I said, “How if I close it now, what then?”
“Then you have us,” the father said, “cut loose aboard your boat. Do you want that?”
I said, “How if I throw it overboard? Through that porthole, still open, here and now? How if the sea washes out all the ink, you and them together, what then?”
Then was when the boy rushed me, mute and dreadful. I…do not know what would have happened, if that pen of his had pierced me. I have lived a long time and seen many things, seen and done many things, that he may not have accounted for: just a boy, after all. If he was ten years old, he was not more than ten.
Still. I do not know what would have happened. But they had taken some form, some solidity on my good solid bridge of a boat. Maybe they took it from the boat; maybe the boat forced it on them. They weren’t fog, they were compounded of more than fog and fear now, and the table was between us and he couldn’t quite come at me, he had to stretch across.
Which meant that I did just have time to do what I meant to do, because I would never have condemned the family to a sea-bed shared with these two. However diffuse, dissolved, diluted.
I stepped back, and tore that endpaper out of the Bible as I went.
I had their names in my hand, and I heard them howling as I went to the porthole.
I heard the crash of it as the table was knocked off its trestles, I felt the cold of them biting at my heart as they came, at the blood in my veins and the breath in my lungs.
Too late, they came. I crumpled that heavy paper between my hands and hurled it out of the port, into the dense fog and down to the sea.
Perhaps they followed it. Perhaps they had to. Perhaps there was an eddy in the fog as they went. I don’t know.
I do know that it took me a minute to move, to turn around, to be sure that the room was empty now.
That the first thing I did was bend down and retrieve that heavy Bible. It had fallen on its face, open and askew, so that the family page was crumpled and torn. I was disinclined to smooth it; I didn’t want to ally myself with any family that had earned itself such a cold and lingering hatred. I wouldn’t send them down after their assailants, but the next port of call, this book was going ashore. And not being passed on to some other innocent’s custody. Just in case. Who knew what else might not be written in its pages, sewn into its spine, glued behind its covers? I had drowned one page of it; I thought I might burn the rest.
In the meantime, I took it to my cabin: before I went to the engine-room to start the diesel thumping, before I went up to the wheelhouse to talk to the coastguard and see if we were back on their radar yet.