Crackdown

  “It seems stupid,” I said, “that it should end like this.”

  “Think how much worse it is for Thessy,” she said with an apparent callousness that was designed to keep her from crying, but the design failed, and the tears began to run as she hugged me one last time. “I wish I’d remembered to bring some jeans,” she said suddenly, “because it’s going to be so embarrassing to climb down that ladder wearing a dress.”

  “But a thrill for everyone else,” I said, then I hugged her close and advised her not to go to Great Inagua, but to sail Addendum to the Florida Keys instead.

  “I probably will,” she sniffed.

  I shook Jackson Chatterton’s hand again. “Safe home,” I told the big man. “And take care of Ellen.”

  “I will, Nick, I will.”

  I walked back to Masquerade alone. The night was noisy with insects and bright with stars. The kerosene lamps at Bonefish’s house were lit and at least a score of mourners still sang under the lemon trees, but I wanted to be alone and so I skirted the house. A noise erupted in the bushes to my right, sounding like a heavy body charging straight at me, and I turned, heart thumping with adrenalin, but it was only one of Bonefish’s pigs that swerved away from me and ran squealing towards the light.

  Masquerade was a great shadowed bulk in the darkness. I clumsily climbed the nine-foot wooden ladder and pushed back the tarpaulin which had failed to keep Bonefish’s chickens from roosting in her cockpit. The big timber baulks that cradled my boat creaked as my weight shifted her hull and as I slid back her hatch and dropped down into the cabin.

  It was stiflingly hot below decks. I edged into the forecabin, which I had rebuilt as a workshop and store, and pushed open the fore-hatch. Back in the big main-cabin I took out the companionway’s washboards so that the night’s small wind could blow clean through the two sweltering cabins, then lit a candle that I placed under a lamp’s glass chimney. The small dancing light reflected back from the glossy white paint and deep varnish that preserved Masquerade’s cabin from the ravages of salt and sea. It was strange to be in my boat again. If I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the sound of the hymn singing, concentrating instead on the beat of the surf, it was almost possible to imagine that Masquerade was afloat, and then the wind gusted to make the hull move a creaking millimetre inside its cradling and the illusion was almost perfect.

  The booming call of the ferry’s siren announcing the ship’s late arrival in the bay made me open my eyes. Palm fronds clattered above the companionway, belying my dream that I was at sea. I opened the locker above the sink and took out a warm bottle of beer. The beer, with a tin of fruit cake left over from Christmas, would make my supper.

  It was still cruelly hot inside the boat. The wind was not finding its way down either hatchway so that the sweat was running in rivulets down my back and belly, and I knew I would have to rig a canvas windscoop before I tried to sleep. Then I forgot the discomfort of the heat for the boat had shifted again, but this new movement was not caused by the wind, but rather because someone or something had stepped on to the ladder. I froze, then there was the unmistakable sound of a shoe scraping on one of the crudely carved rungs. “Who’s there?” I called.

  There was no answer, only the creak of the ladder as my visitor climbed towards Masquerade’s cockpit. “Who’s there?” I called, but again no one replied, and I thought of a drug lord’s revenge, so I pulled up the cabin sole and groped deep into the bilge for the big clumsy pistol, yet even if I found the Webley I knew it would be too late, for I had protected the hidden weapon with a thick waterproof wrapping of taped plastic and it would take me precious seconds to disentangle the gun, by which time the intruder would have found me. I felt my blood run cold with the fear of imminent horror, then I wondered whether the bastards had already found Ellen and I cursed myself for abandoning her on the pier.

  I found the gun and pulled it towards me, but my intruder was already standing at the top of the companionway ladder, blotting out the stars and staring down to where I sprawled helplessly in the small yellow light of the guttering candle. I let the plastic-wrapped gun drop back into the bilge.

  “I didn’t want to go home,” my visitor said, and her wine-dark dress rustled as she climbed down into the cabin. I stood up to meet her and to hold her. Then I kissed her, and my own eyes were closed because I was so very glad that she had come back. “I’m not a cook any more, am I?” Ellen asked, and her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “No,” I said, “you’re not.”

  “It’s hot in here.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  Her dress rustled as it dropped to the cabin’s sole. Above Masquerade the stars blazed.

  And I blew out the candle.

  In the morning I found Ellen sitting by the lagoon, hugging her knees and watching the sea. Her flaming red hair was twisted into a bun. Apart from a book to read on the ferry she had brought no luggage to the island, for she had not expected to stay beyond the one day, so she had nothing to wear except the red dress. In its place she had found a pair of my old shorts and a T-shirt, both of which hung from her like a suit of barge sails draped on a racing dinghy, but even my misshapen clothes could not diminish Ellen’s beauty. I smiled at her with the shyness new lovers have on first waking, and Ellen smiled back, but it was apparent she did not want to talk; instead she just took my hand and gave my knuckles a swift kiss as though to tell me that everything was well.

  I made coffee on the spirit stove, and offered her a slice of the tinned fruit cake for breakfast. Startlingly white egrets were flying up from the far mangrove trees. “Are there flamingos here?” Ellen broke the silence.

  “I’ve not seen any.”

  “What were you thinking”—Ellen turned a very serious face to me—”when you had to kill those men on Wavebreaker?”

  I wondered where that question had sprung from. “I was too scared to think.”

  “Scared?” She still frowned as though she did not believe me.

  “Scared and sick,” I admitted. “As thugs go, you see, I’m remarkably inexperienced.” I spoke lightly, though in truth I still woke sweating in the night as I imagined what would have happened if I had not managed to seize Sweetman’s Uzi and kill the two gunmen before they turned the Kalashnikovs on us. My other nightmare was my firm conviction that if I had only fired at the second gunman first, Thessy would still be alive. “The best quality for a soldier,” I said sadly, “is to have no imagination, none.”

  But I had imagination enough to know what would happen if Jesse Sweetman or his friends found us and so, after breakfast, I unwrapped and cleaned the big Webley. Ellen watched me do the chore, but made no comment. When it was cleaned I pushed the gun into a pocket of my shorts, but after an hour my own sense of looking ridiculous made me take the gun off and hide it again in Masquerade.

  I spent the rest of that morning with Bonefish, not doing very much and not even speaking about Thessy very much, but just trying to repair the reed-valve on Bonefish’s old outboard motor. I did promise to write to some of our old charter customers to enquire if they had any photographs of Thessy, for the only picture that Bonefish and his wife possessed was one that had been taken when Thessy was about eight years old—though, as Ellen remarked, he hardly looked a day different to when he was seventeen.

  It was a sweet weekend, despite the sadness that had brought Ellen and me so close. I did some work on Masquerade, but mostly Ellen and I just walked or swam or talked. The best day we had was the Sunday, Ellen’s last full day on Straker’s Cay, when we sailed Bonefish’s skiff to one of the deserted outer islands where nothing but the sea and the birds and the iguanas and the palms existed. We swam naked in the lagoon and watched a Spotted Eagle Ray’s languid beauty as it rippled above the sandy sea-floor, and I turned my head to watch Ellen swimming and I wondered if ever again I would know such happiness, and then I remembered that once Masquerade was in the Pacific we would spend our lives wandering betwee
n palm-fringed beaches and forgotten islands.

  We let the sun dry us, and we made the silly talk that lovers do. We astonished ourselves at our own joy, and believed that no one else had ever known such bliss. I thought of Robin-Anne’s dismissal of all pleasure as nothing but the brain’s unromantic secretion of chemical traces, and I supposed that love could be similarly dismissed as a cocktail of genetic impulses and seething testosterone, but I did not believe it. This was happiness, a glorious happiness, a taste of heaven. I did not know why I loved Ellen; I thought half her opinions were mad, and she probably thought all mine were, yet we laughed together and we had found a care for each other and for each other’s dreams and lives and hopes.

  Ellen had brought her book to the deserted island, but was too hot or too happy or too lazy to read it. “A Feminist Symbolist’s Perception of Goethe,” I read the title aloud. “Bloody hell, woman.”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” Ellen said lazily, “on account of its utter lack of pictures.”

  “You can buy me the comic-strip version.” I flipped through the book, seeing where Ellen had made notes in her tiny precise handwriting. The author was described as being ‘chair-person’ of a Women’s Studies Department of a Californian university. “Why is there no such thing as a Department of Men’s Studies?” I asked.

  “We leave the study of mindless brutes to the animal behaviourists,” she pounced with undisguised glee, then laughed at her small victory. “Would you like to be studied?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  “But I study you.” She turned over on to her front. We were both still naked and our warm skin was flecked with sand.

  “What have you learned about me?” I asked.

  “How very desperate the big tough Nick is for approval and love.” She pronounced the verdict very seriously, then lightly touched my face with a finger. “What happened to all the other girls?”

  “What other girls?”

  She sighed and rolled on to her back. “He was a marine, and he’s a virgin?”

  I laughed. “Some were good, some were bad. Some just wanted to use me as a means to meet my father.”

  “So you learned to distrust them?”

  “Maybe.” I thought about it. “Some just wanted me to be more ambitious. One girl said she wouldn’t marry me unless I became an officer.”

  “And why didn’t you become an officer?”

  “Because that would have been expected of Tom Breakspear’s son.”

  “Ah!” Ellen said triumphantly. “So you joined the Marines solely to annoy your father! You wanted his attention. He ignored you as a child, didn’t he?”

  “No more than he ignored anything or anyone else,” I said. “In my father’s heaven there is only one star.”

  “Poor Nick.”

  “No.” I did not need pity. I had, after all, grown up in the most lavish wealth. I had lived in a succession of beautiful houses, from English manors to exquisite French chateaux to a vast Beverly Hills mansion. I remembered the hours of loneliness in Beverly Hills, the echo of the marble hallways, the splash of the fountain in the swimming pool and the subdued laughter of the servants in their rooms over the big garage. Once, when I was eight, my father had bought everything in a toyshop and had it all shipped to the mansion. I had rewarded him by putting every single toy into the swimming pool until the blue water was heaped with tin trains and teddy bears, awash with building blocks and cowboy outfits, littered with bicycles and dolls’ houses. “My father,” I said slowly, “should have beaten the living daylights out of me.”

  “Silly Nick.” She cut open a mango and pushed a slice towards me. “I suspect I would like your father.”

  “You would like him if he wanted you to like him. He has the ability to be whatever anyone wants him to be, and if you wanted him to be modest and kind and erudite and learned, then that’s what he’d be for you, and you’d never believe it if I told you that he screws anything that moves, regardless of gender, and has a mind like a cesspit.”

  “But you love him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re his favourite child?” The guess was a little more tentative than her previous assertion, but it was no less true.

  “Probably,” I conceded, then watched as Ellen, satisfied with her cross-examination, lay back and closed her eyes. “So what about you?” I asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Who were your lovers?”

  It was an awkward question, born of a lover’s clumsy jealousy, but Ellen did not seem to mind it being asked. “Academics and activists.” She shrugged, as though none of them had left a mark on her soul. “They told me they were above lust, that their interest in me was purely to share the cause and explore the cosmos, but all they ever really wanted was a fuck.”

  “You can’t blame them,” I said, maybe a shade too warmly.

  Ellen turned her head and looked very gravely at me. I thought I was about to be reprimanded for levity, but instead she smiled. “Poor Sir Tom,” she said gently.

  “To have me as a son, you mean?”

  “To be denied you as a son,” she corrected me, then drew my face down to hers.

  The waves rippled the sand. The wind was a warm sigh. The world was at peace. I was in love.

  We went back to Masquerade and I built a fire and cooked freshly caught mullet for our supper. I had not taken the Webley revolver to the deserted beach, but I kept it beside me as we ate. Ellen hated the sight of the weapon, and claimed we did not need it. “That man Smedley didn’t say that Sweetman’s friends would take revenge,” she told me that evening in her most no-nonsense tone, “only that there was a possibility that they might. I reckon they won’t, because if they really wanted to kill us, then they would surely have tried already. I think Smedley is just trying to earn his salary by being pompous.”

  I was more concerned than Ellen. I was far less sanguine than I had been when the DEA agent had first uttered his lackadaisical warning. I felt fairly safe on Straker’s Cay; the island was so small, the islanders were watching out for us, and no stranger could have landed without our knowing of their arrival within minutes, but it was that snug safety of the place which was undoubtedly contributing to Ellen’s growing sense of security, and that worried me. It especially worried me that she was insisting on returning to Freeport the next day, and so, after we had eaten, I again tried to persuade her not to leave Straker’s Cay at all.

  She shook her head. “I can’t do a proper job here, Nick. I’d want to feel useful.”

  “I can teach you some carpentry.”

  “Thank you, but no,” she said very deliberately, then laughed at the very thought of handling a saw or a chisel. “It’ll be OK,” she reassured me. “I’ll sail Addendum to the Keys and hide there like a little bunny in its hole.”

  “Then at least let me escort you as far as Addendum,” I urged her.

  She turned her head to look at me. The fire was burning low and its dark light shadowed her face wondrously. “I am not in need of a nursemaid, Nicholas Breakspear.” She always used my full name whenever she wished to chide me, which was usually at those moments when she thought I was exhibiting the cardinal male sin of being over-protective.

  “I just want you to be safe,” I explained.

  “I want myself to be safe, astonishingly enough,” she said tartly, “so I shall sail away from here on a safely crowded ferry, safely collect some clothes from my apartment, say a safe goodbye to the Literacy Project, then safely disappear on Addendum. Does that safe agenda meet with your approval?”

  “I’d still rather come with you to make sure that you’ll be all right,” I said stubbornly.

  “You’ve no reason to travel to Freeport.” She leaned forward and tried to stir some life into the fire. “I’m a grown woman, not some shivering female in need of protection.”

  She was adamant, so late that night I walked to the village and, without Ellen knowing, tried to telephone the Maggot. In truth I had l
ittle hope of reaching him, for using the Bahamian inter-island telephone system is akin to bouncing messages through far galaxies towards an alien starship that might or might not exist. The system was a mixture of bakelite telephones, fibre-optics, old-fashioned operators, microwave links, and VHF radios, and it was a rare day that any two components meshed smoothly. However, fate was being kind to me that Sunday night and the whole system worked beautifully and, even more miraculously, the Maggot was actually at home. I asked him a favour, and the Maggot, being a kind man, gave it to me. “But don’t tell Ellen!” I warned him.

  “Not a word,” he promised, “not a word.”

  Which meant, whether Ellen liked it or not, that I had done the male chauvinist thing, and she was protected.

  I slept badly, dreaming of Thessy’s body bumping across the locker’s drowned sill, then of the dying man’s shoes beating the deck like a drummer’s tattoo.

  I woke Ellen with my restlessness. For a time we lay silent, listening to the night waves breaking on the reefs beyond the lagoon, and to the clatter of the palm fronds above our grounded boat. The windscoop drifted a fitful breeze through Masquerade that stirred the black mesh of the insect screen that Ellen had rigged across the hatchway. “I don’t want Thessy to have died for nothing,” I said at last, explaining my unrest.

  “Are you dreaming of revenge, my noble and silly Nick?”

  “Yes.”

  She traced her fingers across my chest. “Leave it to the law.”

  “The law won’t do anything. It’s been corrupted by money.”

  “So what will you do?” Ellen challenged me. “Go in shooting? Nick at high noon? Gunfight at the Sea Rat Corral? And you’ll end up just like Thessy, nothing but a mound of dirt in a cemetery.”

  “Thessy’s not a mound of dirt,” I protested, “he’s in heaven, where he doesn’t have to read gloomy minor prophets any longer and he gets fried bread and bananas every morning, and God has given him a lovely boat to sail in a challenging wind all day and every day, and he’s got lots of friends and he keeps telling them about this wonderful couple called Nick and Ellen who’ll one day be joining him.”