Twenty-Eight

Six years ago my lover, the father of my unborn child, had killed himself. Of course, everyone had told me I mustn’t, not for one minute, blame myself. I said it to myself, in my doctor’s tone of voice. He was a depressive. He had tried it before. You thought you could save him but we can only save ourselves. And so on.

One week ago my lover – the only other man I’d ever really loved – had killed himself. People’s admonitions that I should not blame myself were beginning to sound a bit frantic. Danny’s funeral was the next day but I was not going to attend. He’d died in another woman’s arms, hadn’t he? He’d run away from me entirely. At the thought of Danny and Finn together, I felt hot, loose; almost excited and almost despairing. For a moment I was quite sick with jealousy and hopeless lust.

‘I’m off out now, Sally,’ I said a few minutes later. ‘I won’t be back before you leave so I’ve left the money on the mantelpiece. Thanks for making everything look so much better.’

‘Not going to work?’ Sally looked at my faded blue jeans, ripped at one knee, my beaten-up leather jacket.

‘I’m going sailing.’

She pulled a face. Of disapproval?

‘Nice,’ she said.

Finn’s two doctors, one her supposed protector, the other the sole beneficiary of her will, didn’t have much to say to each other on the short drive to the sea. Michael seemed preoccupied and I looked out of the window without seeing anything. When the car pulled to a halt he turned to me.

‘You forgot to put your wet suit on,’ he said.

It was in a carrier bag between my feet.

‘You forgot to tell me to put it on.’

We continued in silence. I looked for the sea. The day was too grey. The car turned off on to a narrow road between high hedges. I looked inquiringly.

‘I’ve moved the boat near to the boat-house.’

It felt like driving in a tunnel and it was a relief when we came out into the open. I saw some boats. When the car stopped I heard them rattling in the wind. There were a few wooden shacks, with peeling paint. One of them was abandoned and open to the sky. There was nobody around at all.

‘You can change in the car,’ Michael said briskly.

‘I want a changing room,’ I said in a sulky tone and got out of the car. ‘Which one’s yours?’

‘I don’t really want to go to the trouble of opening it up. The car would be better if it’s all right with you.’

‘It isn’t.’

Michael extracted himself awkwardly from the car. He was already in his rubbers, big and slick and black.

‘All right,’ he said with an ill grace. ‘Over here.’

He led me to a seasoned wooden building with double doors facing the sea and handed me his bunch of keys.

‘The door might be a bit stiff,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring. There’s a life-jacket hanging on a hook.’ He padded off the coarse yellow grass and along the pebbly beach to the boat. ‘Stay near the front or you’ll probably tread on something sharp or pull something down on you.’

I looked along the shoreline. Nobody, and no wonder: the sky was all shades of slate and the water was whipped up by vicious squalls. White spray flew off the waves. I could hardly see the point from where I stood and the wind on my face felt icy. I scraped the key into the lock and with difficulty turned it, pushing one of the doors narrowly open. Inside, there was a jumble of objects: yellow and orange life-jackets hanging from a large hook on the wall to my left, two fishing rods standing propped against the opposite wall, several large nylon bags which, when prodded by my curious foot, turned out to contain sails. At the back of the shed lay a windsurfer. There were buckets, bailers, boxes with nails and hooks and small implements I didn’t recognize, a few empty beer bottles, an old green tarpaulin, some pots of paints, sandpaper, a tool box, a crowbar, a broom. A thick smell of oil, salt, sweetness, rot, decay. There was probably a dead rat in here.

I laid the wet suit on a rough wooden bench and started to pull off my clothes, shivering in the icy, stagnant air. Then I tugged on the unwelcoming rubber. It closed relentlessly around my limbs. God, what was I doing here?

I’d dropped the little rubber shoes on my way to the bench so I gingerly hobbled across the shed to pick them up, trying to avoid stepping on wood chips and grit with my bare feet, and then tottered back. Sitting on the bench once more I rubbed the soles of my feet to remove the debris that had stuck to them. Something – it felt like a straw stalk – had caught between two toes. I prised them apart and removed it. A pink bit of paper twisted into the shape of something with four legs and a sort of head and a funny little tail. I rotated it in my fingers, a little cousin to the six creatures standing on my kitchen table.

Could Michael have brought it along? Could it have stuck to his clothes? ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring.’ Last spring Danny and I had been squabbling in London. Danny had been here. I was in a fever. I knew that I needed to think clearly but the objects in the room were shifting in shape, making me dizzy. My stomach shifted. I felt each hair on my skin prickling against the inside of my outer, rubber, skin. There was a light of clarity on the edge of my mind and I had to calculate my way towards it, but everything I had been sure of was now twisted out of shape. Danny had been here.

‘Remember your life jacket, Sam.’

I turned to the door where Michael was standing, silhouetted against the grey. I closed my fist around the little paper creature. He came towards me.

‘Let me help you with that,’ he said. He pulled the zip up behind me, so hard that it made me gasp. I was aware of his large physical presence. ‘And now the boots.’ He knelt in front of me. I sat down and he took both my feet in turn and gently eased them into the boots. He looked up with a smile. ‘The slipper fits, Cinderella,’ he said. Danny had been here. He took a yellow life-jacket from the hook and slipped it over my shoulders. ‘And, finally, your gloves.’ I looked down at my closed fist. I took the gloves in my left hand.

‘I’ll put them on in a minute.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’

With an arm gently on my back, he escorted me down to the boat and we climbed on board. He looked at me, and with the wind blowing in our faces I couldn’t make out his expression.

‘Now, let’s have a bit of fun.’

I’d been here before, the wet rope callusing my palm as I pulled it taut, the boat rising steeply in the wind, sails cracking in the gusts, iron-grey water slopping over the sides, the weird cries of seabirds as we scudded our lonely way out to open sea, the curt commands of ‘lee-oh’ as I cast myself desperately from side to side, the silent minutes of leaning back against the boat’s violent heeling. Danny had been in the boat-house. I tried to think of an innocent explanation. Could Danny have gone there on a walk with Michael? The door hadn’t been opened since last spring. Michael had said so. The little paper creature was still clasped in my frozen fist.

We tacked swiftly away from the shore and the spray stung my face so that if I was crying he wouldn’t know. And I didn’t know. Images passed through my mind: Finn when she arrived at my house, so white and mute; Danny staring at her across the table – and the expression that I could vividly recall wasn’t one of desire, then, but of discontent; Danny with Elsie, lifting her on to his lap, leaning down to her so that his black hair tangled with her blonde wisps. I tried to cling to wisps of thought. Danny had been there. Danny hadn’t run away with Finn. Danny hadn’t committed suicide.

‘You’re silent, Sam. Are you getting the hang of it?’

‘Maybe.’

At that moment a gust caught us, and the boat lifted up so it was almost vertical. I leaned my whole weight out.

‘There we are, we’re almost round the point.’ Michael sounded completely calm. ‘Then we needn’t go so close to the wind. Ready about…’

And we swung, with a neat whip of the boom and a smack of the sails, into open sea, with the wind steady from the side. I looked back, and I couldn’t see the shore we’d started from. It was lost in mist and grey glare.

‘That was pretty good.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you beginning to feel better, Sam?’

I attempted a shrug and a neutral mumble.

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t feel sick,’ I said. He looked at me closely. He turned away. He was holding the tiller and mainsheet with one hand now and fiddling with something in his other. I looked around. Then he was close beside.

‘What did you find, Sam?’

There was a metallic cold sensation in the pit of my stomach.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

Very quickly, before I could move, he seized my right wrist and opened the fingers. He was strong. He took the small paper animal from me.

‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘It might have stuck to your clothes.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Or it might have got stuck on my clothes.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He gave a spooky little giggle and shook his head.

‘Sadly not,’ he said. ‘Pull your jib in tighter, Sam, we’re going to beat a bit.’

The wind was getting stronger again; it bit into my left cheek. Michael pulled on the tiller so that the boat swung away from the wind and let the mainsail billow. We had safely rounded the point and were now heading back to the coastline, towards the sharp needles of rocks that he’d pointed out last time. I turned and looked at him from close up. His strange face looked its best in the wind and the spray. The fog in my mind was slowly dispersing. Finn had been murdered. Danny had been murdered, and I was going to be murdered. I had to speak.

‘You killed Finn.’

Michael looked at me with a half-smile playing across his features but said nothing. His pupils were dilated: there was excitement coursing under that composed surface. What had he once told me about liking a challenge?

‘A spot of running now, let your jib out, Sam.’

I obediently spooled the rope out and the small sail filled with wind. The boat sat back, lifted its bows; water surged beneath us.

‘And did Danny stumble on it? Is that it? So you killed Danny, staged the suicide? And that note, that awful note.’

Michael gave a modest shrug.

‘Unfortunately a degree of coercion was required to produce that. But you’re failing to appreciate the whole picture, Sam.’

‘And then…’ I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t care about my own life, I just had to know. ‘You and Finn killed her parents together, I suppose.’ The Belladonna was taking us towards the treacherous cross-currents: I saw the way he was measuring distance with his calculating sailor’s gaze. I looked down towards the water. Death by drowning.

‘Something like that,’ he replied casually, and smiled again as if a joke had occurred to him. His teeth and his grey eyes shone, his hair whipped back in the wind and spray: he looked eager, rather beautiful, appalling.

And then I thought of Elsie. I remembered how her body felt against mine; I could almost feel her strong little arms around my neck. I remembered how she’d looked that morning when I’d dropped her off at school, in her purple tights and her spotty dress and her solid legs and her freckles. The shine on her hair. Her concentration, pink tip of tongue sticking out when she painted. I wasn’t going to die out here and leave my daughter an orphan. I idled with the rope between my fingers.

‘Why kill Finn then?’

He laughed then; really threw back his head and guffawed as if I’d made a brilliant joke.

‘For the money, of course. But you’re still not seeing the whole, beautiful picture.’

Then the boat tilted violently, as if the wind had suddenly changed direction. The sails flapped and the boom lurched. Without Michael saying anything, I tightened the jib as he pulled in his mainsail, and the boat raced towards the violent eddy. I could see it now: the shiny patch of sucked-in water. The outcrop of rocks was getting closer, their crags and splinters coming into focus. The wind was suddenly up and I could only shout.

‘Needle Point?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘You’re going to kill me.’

But I spoke too quietly for him to have heard and he was immersed in the business of sailing. I looked at the bottom of the boat. A bailer. A long metal pole. A spare sail stowed at the bows. A coil of rope. A pair of oars. The boat was like a bucking horse now, thwacking its nose over and over into the trough of the sea. Suddenly it stopped, halted in its tracks, and I could feel no wind at all, although all around me I could see the wild sea. The sails wilted. We were in the eye of the storm. I looked across at Michael, who was looking at me. He shook his head, as if in disappointment.

‘It’s so irritating and unnecessary,’ he said. ‘Like the bloody cleaner.’

‘Like Mrs Ferrer? You…?’

Michael turned away. He was looking from side to side, trying to assess where the wind would come from. He said nothing, and we sat side by side – me and the man who was going to kill me – in the becalmed moment. For an instant Michael seemed almost embarrassed by the awkward hiatus. Then it hit us full from behind and the boat jolted. Its sails smacked loudly, like a gun going off, and it lifted its bow so high out of the water that I was flung to its bottom. For one moment I thought it would do a backward somersault on to us. I looked up, my legs thrashing, and saw Michael’s face looking down at me. It loomed out of the weather, handsome and polite.

‘Sorry, Sam,’ he said, leaning towards me as if he were bowing. He had the pole in his hand.

I rose, bailer in my hand, and hurled myself at the boom. It swung towards Michael but he ducked. I threw the bailer at his head and kicked wildly at him. He grunted and let go of the tiller and mainsheet and pole. Water was pouring in now and the boom was crashing from side to side. Michael dived at my waist and brought me down to the bottom of the boat once again. His face was a few inches from mine; a trickle of blood oozed down his forehead. There was a trace of stubble beneath the sweat and spray. I brought my knee up under the cage of his straining body and kneed him sharply in the groin, then, as he spasmodically jerked, I bit at the nearest lump of flesh. His nose. He shouted and punched at my jaw, my neck, into my breasts, into the bouncy rubber of my stomach. One finger pierced my eye so that for a moment the world was a red ball of pain. I could feel his breath and I could feel the blows rain down on my body, my jaw, my ribs.

Michael heaved himself into position, knees on my outstretched arms, and put his hands around my neck. I spat at him, my blood on his bloody, grimacing face. This was it. I was to be throttled and tossed overboard like a bit of live bait. He started to squeeze, slowly and with concentration. Behind his head I saw the giant shape of Needle Point bearing down on us, blotting out the sky. I bucked under Michael’s body. I needed to live. I needed to live so badly. I thought that if I could say Elsie’s name out loud I would live. I opened my mouth and felt my tongue slide forward, my eyes roll back. If I could say Elsie’s name I would still live, though my world had gone black.

There was a jolt from beneath the hull, a screeching sound of wood on rock. Michael was thrown off me. Black waves; black rocks all around. I knelt up, grasped the pole, and as Michael stood on the breaking boat I thrust it into his body with all the force I could manage and saw him tip. It wasn’t enough. I looked around, desperately, hungrily. The tiller. I pulled it sharply towards me. The wild boom jibed and viciously struck him; his body crashed into the sea.

‘Elsie,’ I said. ‘Elsie, I’m coming home.’ Then the boat broke against the rocks and the water closed around me.