Crackdown

  “For ever?” I sounded appalled.

  “I think he’s just being himself,” Jackson Chatterton said sourly, “an eternal jerk.”

  “And his father might become President,” I said sourly.

  “Glory be!” Chatterton said mockingly, and began to laugh. “I tell you, Nick, if that man’s serious about winning the jackpot, then the sooner he puts Rickie in a straitjacket, the better.”

  Yet Rickie did have better moments when he seemed to realise just what a jerk he truly was, and in those moments he would ineptly try to help with the working of the ship, and he would even apologise for his obnoxious behaviour, though the apologies were usually addressed to Ellen, Chatterton or Thessy, and rarely to me. I suspected that there was something inherent in my character or appearance that irritated Rickie, because I noted how even in his lucid and calmer moments he took care to avoid me. Only once did he deliberately seek out my company, and that was when he fetched a chart up to the cockpit and asked me to show him where we were. I pencilled a cross to mark our estimated position and showed him how we had been beating up and down in the open ocean, parallel with the islands but always out of their sight.

  “What’s the point of that?” he asked, with only a trace of his usual hostility.

  “It’s a good way of shaking everyone down,” I said. “If we were constantly anchoring and going ashore then no one would fall into a shipboard routine.” I hesitated, wondering how much truth he could bear, and decided he might as well hear it all. “I thought the whole idea of the cruise-cure was to isolate you. How can I do that if we’re in and out of anchorages?”

  “Yeah, sure, sure.” He brushed off my explanation and stared at the pencilled cross I had made on the chart. “But we will go back to the islands?”

  “Of course.” I should probably already have taken Wavebreaker back to the islands, for our hopelessly inadequate watch-keeping arrangements were making Thessy and me more and more tired. Yet, if I was honest with myself, I knew my weapon of choice against Rickie was to keep him out at sea. He used the cassette player and I used navigation. It takes two to fight.

  “So when do we go back to the islands?” he demanded.

  “In a few days?” I was deliberately vague.

  “I want to do some scuba, right? Have some fun!” He said the last three words in an outraged voice, as though ‘fun’ was the birthright of a rich American youth, and I was being unnaturally cruel in denying it to him. I said nothing, which only annoyed him. “Or do you think I’ll run away if we go ashore?”

  “Would you?” I asked.

  “I just want to do some scuba!” He was still outraged. “OK?”

  “OK,” I said placatingly.

  “And soon, you know?” He snatched the chart away from me and roughly folded it. “I mean, like before next year?”

  “A week at the very most,” I promised him.

  He bad-temperedly chucked his cigarette end towards the sea, but it fell into the scuppers and I saw the flicker of pride cross his face as he was tempted to leave the smoking and glowing butt to make a scorch mark on the wood, but then he saw my expression and, behaving as though he had never intended to do anything else, he stalked to the gunwale and contemptuously flicked the cigarette over the side. He went below without another word and two minutes later I heard the nauseating sound of the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band crashing through the boat.

  Robin-Anne had the capacity to be entirely more pleasant company, except that she had fallen into a torpor of careless inactivity. She abandoned her heavy eating, picking listlessly at her meals instead. She seemed self-absorbed and almost as short-tempered as her brother, yet she made far more effort to be sociable, and when a half-dozen dolphins one day decided to keep Wavebreaker company I thought I saw Robin-Anne enjoy a moment of pure innocent pleasure as she watched the lovely creatures dive and leap in our quarter-wave. She took a particular liking for Thessy, and the two of them would often sit close together, talking and talking, and there was something curiously touching about the sight. I asked Thessy what they spoke about, and he told me that he was trying to lead her to Christ, then complained that Robin-Anne would never listen to his evangelism because all she ever wanted to do was talk about cocaine.

  I smiled. “I know.”

  I knew because it had become Robin-Anne’s habit to come on deck each night and there to use me as a sounding-board for her obsession with the drug. I heard how, in the dark hell of anhedonia, an addict took alcohol or barbiturates or any other thing that might alleviate that terrible Godless empty black hole of dopamine exhaustion. She told me about the seething paranoia of the addict; how they feared that someone else might be cheating them of their supply. She told me how the addicts fought and stole and lied and whored to find the money to feed their habit. “And in their sane moments,” she said, “they hate themselves for what they’re doing, but the only sure escape from that self-loathing is to use still more cocaine.”

  I had wanted to ask her if she had ever been driven to desperate measures to find cocaine herself, but I did not like to put the question which, in any case, her next words implicitly answered. “Rickie and I were always kind of popular,” she said wryly.

  “Because you had money?”

  “We’ve always had lots of that,” she said with attractive deprecation. She was staring to starboard, where gargantuan clouds shrouded the stars and cast a black pall across the sea. Despite the massing clouds the wind was still steady from the south-east, the seas were long and smooth, and the weather forecast untroubling. Robin-Anne smiled. “You always have plenty of friends if you’ve got lots of money to buy them cocaine.”

  That smile was one of the last she gave me for, night by night, she had been plunging ever deeper into what Jackson Chatterton called the abstinence phase. Robin-Anne tried to explain what he meant as she sat curled in the swathing oilskin jacket. She looked very calm and her voice was softly placid, but I could see her pale, long-fingered hands flexing and twisting as she spoke. She had, as usual, brought me a cup of coffee that I was letting cool on the binnacle shelf as she told me that the first stage of withdrawal was marked by the anaesthesia of sleep and the pleasures of food, but that easy first phase was replaced by the torture of abstinence; a time of wakefulness and torment. Robin-Anne’s torment was the memory of the blissful drenching of her soul with sudden euphoria, the glorious dependability of a chemically induced heaven. It was a memory, Robin-Anne said, that prowled and snarled and clawed at her resolve, begging her to give it the blessing of just one more sniff of cocaine, wheedling to her that one small hit of the magic powder could not possibly hurt.

  “And how long,” I asked, “is the abstinence phase?”

  “If I’m real lucky, three months. Two years if not.” Her huge eyes looked almost liquid in the small light glinting from the binnacle. “And very soon,” she went on sadly, “I’ll begin to hallucinate about the drug, to dream about it, and to lust after it more strongly than I’ve ever wanted anything in all my life. Nothing will matter to me except the drug. If I was in love I would forget my lover, and if I was a mother I’d forget my children, because all I would think about was the drug.” She stared forward, to where one bright star showed under the canopy of dark cloud. Earlier I had tried to get her interested in the sextant, challenging her to catch that one lonely star in its mirrors, but she had been too lackadaisical to make the attempt. Now she shuddered suddenly. “I hate being ill.”

  “Ill?”

  “I’ve got a chemical dependency, Nick. That’s an illness. It isn’t a character weakness, but an illness.”

  I sipped the coffee and grimaced as I realised she had added gobs of sugar and forgotten the milk. “What happens when the abstinence phase is over?” I asked.

  She spread her hands in a simple gesture of benison. “It will be over when my brain no longer resurrects the memory of the drug’s effect, and when that happens I shall be properly alive again, like you and Ellen and Thessy.”


  “May it be soon,” I said, but Robin-Anne did not respond to that dutiful scrap of piety. Instead she went below and a few minutes later, as I went down to fetch a proper coffee, I saw her sitting in front of the tape deck, a set of earphones clamped over her short and so very pale hair; she was rocking obsessively back and forth, back and forth as though she could drive the clawing scrabbling hateful demon out of her soul with a scorching blast of her brother’s fearsome music. I was watching someone I liked slip into a poisonous hell, and I was helpless.

  An hour later Thessy relieved me. I gave him the course, shared a bacon sandwich with him, then went below to sleep.

  Ellen woke me an hour after dawn. I was groggy with sleep and fumbled for the light switch, but instead Ellen swept back the curtains to flood grey daylight into the small cabin. “Trouble, O Captain, my Captain!” she said cheerfully.

  “Oh, no.” I sat up. Ellen held out a grey weatherfax sheet which showed that the isobars had shrunk and wrapped themselves into a depression during the night. The low pressure was far away east in the Atlantic, but Ellen had been right to wake me for we both knew how swiftly such depressions could develop into storms that could move with lightning speed across the sea. I pushed hair out of my face and frowned at the chart which, I saw, had been transmitted just moments before. “Oh, bugger.” I said.

  “Two syllables even!” Ellen mocked me. “Wow!”

  I scowled at her, tried to find some crushing retort, but yawned hugely instead.

  “I must say,” Ellen adopted a southern accent, “that you are just the prettiest sight in the morning, Nick Breakspear. Is that what I have to look forward to all the way across the South Pacific?”

  “You’re not exactly a ball of fun yourself first thing in the morning,” I reminded her, then looked up at the wind-gauge repeater that was mounted on the cabin bulkhead. I saw that the wind speed had dropped a fraction, hovering now on the cusp between force three and four, but there was little comfort to be taken from that reading for the wind direction had moved a fraction southerly and the barometer mounted next to the wind-gauge betrayed that the pressure had dropped even since I’d gone to sleep. I leaned across the bed and tapped the glass and watched the needle fall even further. “We’ll have to run for it,” I said.

  “Bad as that?” Ellen asked with what I suspected was a tinge of enthusiasm for a taste of rough weather.

  “It isn’t a hurricane,” I said dismissively. It was too early in the season for a hurricane, but the small depression could quickly grow into a tropical storm and, under the lash of such a storm, it was hard to tell how it differed from a hurricane. Nor did I want to take any chances with a tired and short-handed crew, and, as shelter was not so very far away, prudence dictated that I should turn our bows westwards and find a hurricane hole where we could safely ride out whatever nastiness the weather brought. I swung my legs to the floor and reached for my shorts. “Is there any coffee?”

  “On the stove, great leader.”

  “Would you tell Thessy to run due west? And tell him I’ll bring a proper course in a moment.”

  “Your every wish is my command,” Ellen said, then took good care to leave before I had time to articulate one of those wishes. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then pulled on one of my old army shirts before picking up Thessy’s much battered Bible that lay on the small table between our beds. It was an ancient Mission Bible, given to Thessy by his father, and bound in stiff black boards that had been discoloured by salt spray and creased with too much use, but the binding was still sound and its red-edged pages intact. Thessy had been instructed by his father to read his way through the whole book, ploughing indiscriminately through the dirty bits, boring bits and bloody bits alike, but he was finding it hard going and had shyly told me that he was much looking forward to reaching the Gospels. So far he had only managed to reach a very minor and remarkably gloomy Old Testament prophet. I kept a finger to mark the particular doom-laden passage that Thessy was now reading, and turned back to Psalm 55. ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord,’ I read, ‘and he shall sustain thee.’ I read the familiar psalm for comfort, and felt the ship wear round as I did so. There was a smack as a wave caught her on the beam, and a crack of the sails, then Thessy had her running hard and strong, and I smiled as I thought how good a sailor Thessy was, and how good a person he was too, then I went to fetch myself a coffee and to work out a course that would lead us to shelter.

  “What’s happening?” Rickie had been sitting at the single sideband radio, perhaps eavesdropping on traffic.

  “It’s your lucky day,” I said. “By dusk we’ll be at anchor.”

  “Yeah, man!” His face showed some of the delight he had demonstrated on the morning he had first joined the ship. He snapped his fingers in celebration, then turned away to probe the radio waves still further.

  I plotted a bearing for San Salvador, then went topsides and gave the new course to Thessy. The wind, which had fallen away, was piping up again, and I suspected the day would soon be lively. The sky was clouding fast, and the sea was rising, reminders of just how quickly a depression could twist into a storm. Not that we were in storm conditions now, and we were nowhere close to shortening sail, but the long wave crests were flecking white and Wavebreaker was beginning to roll as she ran in front of the freshening breeze.

  I braced my legs against the roll. Thessy slackened the mainsheet, and grinned as our bows chopped into a chunk of water that exploded into white fragments and spattered back down the deck. Two hours later the same motion drove the bows under and I felt the long hull shudder as she tore herself free, then I watched as a great sweep of green water rolled down the deck to shatter at the cockpit coaming before pouring thick out of Wavebreaker’s scuppers. Thessy whooped for sheer joy as the main boom touched the starboard-side waves to draw its own miniature and water-splintering wake through the darkening sea. I shared his happiness, for it was a marvellous day’s sailing; exhilarating and quick.

  By mid-afternoon the sky was darkly overcast and the seas had built into great crinkled monsters that looked far more threatening than they actually were. They were big enough to impress Jackson Chatterton who brought a camera on deck and asked me to take his picture against a backdrop of the looming grey waves. “Photographs always make the waves look smaller!” I shouted to him over the rush of wind in the rigging.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Jacko. Stand there! Smile!”

  The water thundered past, but we were safe, running miles ahead of the storm. The whitecaps spilt angry tangles of foam down the waves’ faces, but the wind was no more than force seven, gusting eight, and we still did not need to shorten any sail. Ellen made a big plate of sandwiches, but only Chatterton, Thessy and I were tempted. The twins seemed as oblivious to the food as they were to the magnificent seas. At one point I went below to fetch the radio direction finder and saw Robin-Anne glance out of the stateroom window to where a shaft of sunlight briefly glinted through a rent in the clouds to cast a wash of silver brilliance on the crumpled water as it heaped and rushed on past the hull, but for all the notice Robin-Anne took of the sight she might as well have been blind. Her face was blank, and her thin body was slumped on the stateroom sofa with a discarded book beside her. Rickie had disappeared and I had an unworthy wish that perhaps he was spewing up his belly with seasickness.

  I took a mug of tea to Thessy who did not want to be spelled at the wheel because he was finding too much pleasure in steering the schooner through the great onrush of wind and wave. “How long till landfall, Nick?” he asked.

  “Maybe a half-hour?”

  In fact it was nearer forty-five minutes for, as we closed on the islands, a rainstorm blotted out our visibility. The sea surged up behind, lifting and carrying Wavebreaker forward. Thessy, his face shining from the rain, grinned with delight. He saw the land first, or rather he saw the great white stone tower of the Dixon Hill light high over San Salvador.

  The rain became harder
, bouncing off the deck and cascading thick off the sails. “Do you want a slicker?” I shouted at Thessy.

  He shook his head. I was more tired, or else older, or perhaps more feeble, and decided that I wanted to change into dry clothes and so I left Thessy at the wheel and dropped quickly down the main companionway into the incongruous luxury of our main stateroom where Robin-Anne, stirred from her lethargy, was trying to tune the television to a Bahamian transmitter.

  She nodded a distracted greeting to me, then, turning away, screamed with fright.

  She screamed because her brother had suddenly appeared in the companionway that led from the forward cabins. Blood was pouring from his nose.

  “Jackson!” I shouted, then ran forward to where Rickie was reeling back against the bulkhead. “What happened? Did you fall?”

  “Get lost.” His one good eye was glazed, and its pupil huge. He must have come from the heads, for the door was swinging and I could see a smear of blood on the edge of the toilet bowl, and I guessed he must have been vomiting into the bowl when a lurch of the ship cracked his nose against the edge.

  “Come on, Rickie!” I tried to ease him away from the bulkhead towards one of the chairs, but he thrust me away.

  “Fuck you.” His voice was extraordinarily hoarse, a dry and croaking voice like some cartoon monster. Blood dripped from his chin on to the stateroom carpet. His forehead was greasy with sweat.

  Jackson Chatterton came running from the galley, then slowed as he saw Rickie’s face. “What have you done?” he asked Rickie, but in an oddly accusatory tone.