Crackdown

  “That’s me. Just a dim, shallow and happy Brit.”

  I had meant her to laugh, but instead she frowned as though my happiness was a puzzle that needed to be understood. “Are you going to recite any more of that poetry?”

  “No.”

  “It was Shakespeare, right?”

  “Right.”

  “It was good,” she said.

  “He was a great poet,” I said, as if she needed to be told.

  “I mean your voice and delivery,” Robin-Anne said fervently. “It was good.”

  “It was imitation,” I said in self-disparagement, “just imitation.” I suddenly heard my father’s voice telling me that all acting is mere imitation. “That’s all it is, dear Nick! Only imitation, mere mummery. Why do people take it so seriously?” The wheel suddenly pushed into my left palm and I could feel all the thudding pressure of the sea and the wind concentrated into that one polished spoke. I eased the wheel up, drawing Wavebreaker’s bows harder into the sea and wind, and I was rewarded with another shattering of white spray that exploded prettily about our bows before I let the hull fall away once more. I laughed for the sheer pleasure of playing such games with God’s strong world, then remembered the senator had told me that Robin-Anne liked to sail. I asked her if she wanted to take the wheel.

  She seemed to shudder at the very thought. “I’d be frightened.”

  “But you can sail a boat, can’t you?”

  “I used to sail a little cat-boat in Penobscot Bay, but that was a long time ago. Grandmother lived there in a house that looked over the water, but she’s dead now.” She spoke sadly, as though to a twenty-four-year-old there really was a time of lost innocence, and I suppose, if the twenty-four-year-old was a cocaine addict, then there was indeed such a time.

  “I’ve never understood the appeal of a cat-boat,” I said, “all that great big undivided sail and weather helm and barn-door rudder. It must be like going to sea in a haystack.”

  Robin-Anne nodded very earnestly as though she truly cared about my opinion, but her next question showed that she was paying no attention to my inanities. “What do you think of us?” she asked instead.

  I glanced at her, trying to hide my embarrassment with a swift and flippant response, but I could think of nothing to say and so I looked back at the binnacle, then up to the long moon-burnished sea ahead.

  “I feel really awkward, you see,” Robin-Anne explained her question, “and ashamed.”

  “I’m just the skipper of this barge,” I said, “so you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

  “I feel like a circus animal”—Robin-Anne ignored my disclaimer—”because you’re all expecting me to perform my antics, and I’m not sure I can do it.”

  “What antics?”

  “To stop using cocaine, of course.” She frowned at me. “You’re all watching me, waiting to applaud.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s patronising, and it’s my own fault that you can all patronise me, and I hate myself for it.”

  “Come on!” I said chidingly. “We all like you!”

  “That’s what I mean.” She fell silent for a moment and I saw she was watching the long heaving waves slip past our flanks. Then, with a rustle of the stiff jacket, she looked back to me. “Did you ever try cocaine?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve not even been tempted by it?”

  “No.”

  For a moment she was silent, staring at the sheen of night on the crinkled sea, then she smiled. “You’re lucky. You’re a cocaine virgin. Stay that way, because it’s the most addictive substance on the planet.”

  Her last words had been spoken very portentously, and I rewarded them with a dubious shrug. “Heroin? Alcohol? Nicotine?”

  “You have to persuade a laboratory animal to become addicted to any of those drugs, but you only need to give an animal one dose of cocaine and it’s hooked.”

  The luff of the flying jib had begun to back and fill and so I let the ship’s head fall away.

  “But the real danger of cocaine,” Robin-Anne continued softly, “is that it provides ecstasy, Mr Breakspear.”

  “Call me Nick.”

  “What cocaine does, you see, is to make the brain produce a thing called dopamine. That and a whole lot of other chemicals, but dopamine is the main one.” Her voice was very earnest, as though it was desperately important that I understood what she said. “I know it’s weird,” she went on, “but pleasure is merely the result of naturally occurring chemicals secreted in the brain, and cocaine can turn those chemicals on like a faucet. Can you imagine a day of pure pleasure, Mr Breakspear?”

  I did not need to imagine such a day, I could remember plenty. I remembered lying in bed with a pretty girl while the rain fell on a Devon river outside our window. I remembered the honesty of Masquerade in a force five wind, and then I thought of all the good days to come; days of Ellen and me and Masquerade in far seas, and I must have smiled, for Robin-Anne nodded approval of whatever silent answer I was framing to her question. “Think of all that happiness,” she said, “and understand that a single hit of cocaine, just a single hit, will produce a hundred times as much pleasure-making dopamine as that one happy day. A hundred times! It’s like making love to God. It’s euphoria.”

  I looked at her, but said nothing, and she must have mistaken my silence for disbelief for she hurried to explain her evident knowledge about the drug. “I studied cocaine, you see. I had to. I wanted Rickie to stop using it, and I wanted a friend to stop using it as well, and so I learned everything I could.”

  “And did learning about it mean trying it?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “And thus you discovered euphoria?”

  She nodded again. “And it’s the euphoria that’s so addictive, because you’ve been to heaven, and the real world seems a very dull place afterwards. So you begin to take more cocaine, and quite soon you need more and more cocaine to unlock the gates of heaven, and once you reach heaven you don’t want to leave it and so you take still more cocaine, but by then it isn’t working.”

  She stopped abruptly, perhaps fearing that she was boring me. I turned the wheel a fraction, waiting for her.

  “The catch in this heaven,” she went on, “is that the brain has only got so much dopamine to offer, and once the cocaine has used it all up, then that’s the end of the pleasure. Except the brain is screaming for more dopamine, so you overdose because you can’t accept that the drug isn’t working any longer, and it’s then that cocaine starts doing its other things to you. It shrinks the arteries, and that’s what blinded Rickie’s left eye.”

  I really had nothing useful to say, so I responded with a sympathetic noise that only made Robin-Anne shake her head impatiently. “There’s worse,” she said, “far worse.”

  “You mean a heart attack?”

  “No...” She drew the word out, so that I heard in its simple syllable all the pain and hurt of the drug. Robin-Anne had been staring at the dark sea, but now she turned her big eyes back to me. “The worst thing about cocaine is that once it has exhausted all the dopamine from the brain, then what’s left is a black hole of depression so big and so awful that not all the misery in the world can fill it. People try to beat that misery with barbiturates, but nothing can cure it because you’ve taken away from yourself all chance of feeling pleasure. The doctors have a word for that misery; they call it anhedonia, which only means an inability to feel enjoyment, and that’s what it is, but it feels like hell, like true hell, and it’s a hell you can’t even escape from in sleep because overdosing on cocaine gives you chronic insomnia.”

  Hell was being without God, I thought, but I said nothing, just stared instead at the white wash of cabin light on the rushing water, and I wondered why some people could take cocaine and just walk away from it, while others ended up in hell, or in a peep-show which was probably the same thing.

  “Of course,” Robin-Anne went on, “the brain eventually man
ufactures more dopamine, so after a day or two the cocaine can work again, and you go soaring up from hell into heaven. It’s a roller-coaster, Mr Breakspear, up and down, up and down”—her thin white hand suited the action to her words—”from heaven to hell and back again, and if heaven is euphoria then let me assure you that hell is a terrible place.”

  “So remember the hell,” I said, as though I really could help her with my tuppence worth of cheerful encouragement, “and perhaps that will stop you ever going back to it!”

  “But there’s another kind of hell,” Robin-Anne’s voice was dulled, as though my cheap optimism had depressed her, “which is remembering the euphoria, and having to surrender the means of creating it. That hell is giving up cocaine. I’m in the easy stage, the first few days when you just sleep and eat, but quite soon I’ll be in the hell of denial, Mr Breakspear.”

  I looked past Robin-Anne to where the moon’s path gleamed on the long waves, and then I glanced forward and saw another belt of silver, but this one diffuse and hazy, showing where the first crepuscular light seeped over the world’s grey edge. “Dawn,” I said in a hopeful voice.

  But Robin-Anne did not react, and I looked down to see that she was not watching for the new day, but was crying. I did not know what to say or do. I should have knelt beside her and put my arms around her and promised her that she would be freed from the hell of anhedonia, and that there really was a God and that she did have the strength to tear herself free from cocaine, as others had freed themselves, and I should have assured her that there was true happiness without a drug, but I did not know her well enough to embrace her, so I just let her weep as the sun streaked up in glory from the east.

  Thus Wavebreaker sailed towards the light, carrying her passengers to hell.

  I rousted Thessy out of his bed with a cup of tea, then went to my own bed as he took over the wheel. I slept, dreaming of Masquerade sinking through waves of steel into torrents of fire.

  I woke just before lunchtime to find Wavebreaker still sailing eastwards. Ellen was showing Rickie Crowninshield all the elaborate electronic toys that only Ellen wholly understood; the radios, radars, weatherfaxes and satellite receivers, and Rickie was being surprisingly attentive, but as soon as he saw me he scowled and clamped a pair of headphones over his ears as though to make sure that he did not have to hold any kind of conversation with me. Ellen shrugged at his rudeness.

  “How’s the weather?” I asked her.

  “No change.”

  I squinted through a porthole and saw the sky was scraped blue and bright above an empty sea. “You faxed a chart?” I asked Ellen.

  “Sure did.” She handed me the sheet of grey paper with its synoptic chart which had been transmitted from Florida just a few moments before. I pretended to despise such modern aids, but that was really a defensive reaction because I knew I could never afford such frills for Masquerade. I saw that there was not even a ripple of low pressure off to the east, which was the reassurance I wanted, for a depression to the east could swiftly twist itself into a full-blooded storm.

  “Good morning, Rickie,” I said loudly, wanting to demonstrate that I held no grudge for his behaviour in the night.

  “Yo.” His voice was surly, but suddenly he twisted round to face me and took off the headphones, and I thought he was going to apologise for his rudeness of the previous night, but instead he demanded to know if it was true that we were out in the open ocean and were not planning to make a landfall for some days.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “But I wanted to do some scuba!” he said in outrage.

  “There’ll be a chance, I promise.”

  “Jesus!” he said in exasperation, then turned abruptly away. I waited to see if he would say any more, but he evidently did not want my company. I grimaced at Ellen, then went topsides where I found the ship being steered by its automatic pilot and Thessy and Jackson Chatterton perched halfway up the mainmast with reels of rigging wire from which Thessy was fashioning a parallel set of starboard shrouds. I wanted to double up all Wavebreaker’s standing rigging, just in case we did try to take her across the ocean. There was no sign of Robin-Anne who was presumably asleep. Chatterton climbed down to the deck and told me that Robin-Anne had eaten a huge breakfast.

  “What about Rickie?”

  “He just played with his food,” Chatterton frowned, “and that means he must be over the crash period, which means his behaviour’s going to be difficult.”

  “Even more difficult?” I asked with dread.

  The big man laughed. “Nick, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  It seemed that Jackson Chatterton was right, for we were all witnesses to a dreadful metamorphosis in Rickie. When he had joined the ship he had been nothing but eagerness and smiles, romping about like a new puppy, but now he had turned unrelentingly morose. At lunchtime he scowled at his sister who, wrapped in a dressing gown, fell on the sandwiches as though she had not eaten in weeks. “I’m famished!”

  Rickie would not even try a sandwich, but instead pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. He sipped at his can of diet soda and grimaced at the taste. “Have we got any beer on this boat?” he suddenly asked.

  “No,” Ellen said placidly. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Fuck the doctors.” No one responded, which merely annoyed Rickie. He stared at his sister whose pale face was made even paler by the sun-block ointment she had liberally smeared on her skin. “You like this shit-for-drink, Robbie?”

  Robin-Anne nodded, but was too busy eating to take much notice of her brother, though she did manage to mumble that she thought the diet soda was really kind of good.

  “I think it’s really kind of crap.” Rickie turned his truculent gaze on me. “You must have some liquor aboard, Nick?”

  “Not a drop,” I lied.

  “That’s very un-British of you.” He attempted an atrocious imitation of my English accent. “I thought all British ships were fuelled by rum, sodomy and the lash. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “That’s what they say.” I kept my voice friendly, for I was determined not to be drawn by his provocation.

  “Are you gay, Nick?” Rickie suddenly asked me in what purported to be a tone of serious enquiry. I did not answer, while everyone but Robin-Anne, who was too busy eating, seemed embarrassed. Once again the lack of response infuriated Rickie who, seeking some other means of provocation, hurled his can of soda across the deck. “Shit-juice!” he shouted.

  Ellen caught my eye, and we stared at each other for a sympathetic fraction of a second, then I looked away to see that the sticky liquid had sprayed across the teak planks. “Clean it up,” I said mildly.

  “Rum, sodomy and the lash!” Rickie chanted at me with a sudden and extraordinary vindictiveness.

  Jackson Chatterton stirred as though he proposed to clean up the mess himself, but I waved him down and kept my eyes on Rickie. “Clean it up,” I said again.

  “You clean it up. This is our vacation! I didn’t suggest coming on this heap of a boat to work like a house-servant, isn’t that right, Robbie?”

  Robin-Anne just went on eating.

  “Clean it up,” I told Rickie again.

  Rickie seized Thessy’s can, pulled open its top, and hurled it messily after the first. “Now what are you going to do? Flog me?” He suddenly laughed, then looked at Ellen whom he perceived as a possible ally. “You can never tell with a Brit, can you? It’s either a flog or a fuck.”

  Ellen said nothing to encourage him. Robin-Anne ate stolidly on, while poor Thessy looked terrified. Only Jackson Chatterton seemed comfortable with Rickie’s display of petulant temper. “The man said clean it up,” Chatterton said calmly, “so clean it up!”

  But Rickie was long beyond sense. “This is a vacation!” he screamed at me, “so why are we out here? I want to see a beach! A beach, you know what a beach is? Sand? Surf? I want to go board-sailing, maybe do a little water skiing. I want to do some scuba, for Christ’s sake!?
??

  I ignored him, fetching instead a mop and bucket from one of the big stern lockers. The bucket had a rope attached to its handle and I skimmed it over the stern to haul up a gallon or so of sea-water which I slammed down in front of Rickie. “The deck needs cleaning, Rickie, so do it.” I threw the mop at him.

  He ignored the mop, just staring at me, and I saw him take a breath ready to defy me so I spoke before he could. “Either you clean the deck, Rickie, or I’ll scrub it with your hair.”

  He began to weep. Robin-Anne glanced at him, then smeared mustard on a roast beef sandwich. “It’s real good food,” she said enthusiastically.

  “I’ll help you,” Ellen said to Rickie, then she took his hand and placed it on the mop handle. “Come on,” she said gently.

  Thus, as Rickie feebly dabbed at the deck and as his sister ate, our happy ship sailed on.

  When, before we had sailed, I had tried to anticipate the cruise-cure, I had naively foreseen it as a difficult but intrinsically rewarding experience. I had fondly imagined that the Crowninshield twins, repentant and eager, would work about the ship by day and, exhausted by sea air and honest labour, would sleep all night. I had imagined them as willing partners in our efforts to help them, and I had been encouraged in that optimism by the knowledge that Rickie himself had suggested this drastic therapy of isolation from drugs by going to sea.

  Yet, in the event, I was right about only one thing; it was difficult. We spent aimless days beating up and down the endless wind, carrying our cargo of resentment and despair, and though I worked to strengthen Wavebreaker’s rigging for a notional crossing of the Atlantic, in truth I was rehearsing the arguments I would use to convince Senator Crowninshield that the cruise-cure could not ever work.

  At least not for Rickie, for Rickie was my problem. The cruise-cure might have been his idea, but now that he had embarked on the experience he had no wish to co-operate with it, and instead his moods veered between a cringing self-pity and a vituperative defiance. His weapon of choice became the tape deck on which he played an appalling cacophony of rock music at a level well judged to be loud enough to annoy, but not quite loud enough to provoke me into open hostility. Jackson Chatterton asked me why I simply did not disconnect the tape deck from the boat’s electrical supply, but I suspected that such a move would merely persuade Rickie to transfer his battle to another piece of the boat’s equipment, and one which, unlike the tape deck, might be necessary to Wavebreaker’s survival. I asked Chatterton how long we could expect Rickie’s antisocial behaviour to last, and the big man smiled. “For ever, Nick.”