His eyes closed and he sank like a stone into sleep.
*
Michael awoke with a start in pitch darkness, his mouth parched, tried to sit up and hit his pounding head on something hard. He lay back down, confused and disoriented. Was he in bed with Ashley?
He tried rolling over and reaching out for her, but his arms went into something soft, inches away. He raised them and instantly they touched something hard and unyielding.
He tried rolling to his left. But again, instantly his hands touched something soft. His nostrils were filled with the smell of wood.
Where the hell was he?
He felt as if he was waking from a bad dream. He rolled right, then left, then raised his arms again. Slowly it was coming back. The pub crawl. They’d put him in a coffin. Surely to hell he wasn’t still in it?
He raised his hands and felt the hard wood above him.
Shit. Oh shit. Panic enveloped him. ‘Hey!’ he cried out. ‘Hey!’
His voice sounded oddly flat.
‘Hey!’
He lay still for a moment, desperate for water, his head agony. ‘Hey, guys, enough! OK? Get me outta here!’ he shouted.
Silence greeted him. Utter silence.
He felt a sudden shiver of fear. What if something bad had happened?
‘I’m claustrophobic, OK? Enough! Get me out, NOW!’ He began pushing with all his strength at the lid, but it would not budge. He kicked out hard, pushed up again, banged his arms sideways. ‘LET ME OUT!’
More was coming back to him. The journey in the van. The strange glances between them all. Yelling and yelling, he hammered with his fists on the roof until they hurt so much he had to rest for a moment. Then he stopped. Remembering.
Remembering a newspaper article he had read some years back about coffins. About how much air was in them. Three to four hours if it was well made and you breathed normally. But you could knock that down to less than an hour if you hyperventilated.
Instantly, he tried to calm his breathing down.
As he did, more details came back to him. The torch. The walkie-talkie.
He put his hand on his stomach and felt something hard, long and thin. He fumbled with it, twisted the end. Twisted it again. A feeble glow emerged, for a few seconds, then faded. Shit, the battery had died.
Then he found the walkie-talkie. Pressed a button on it. There was a weak, green glow. Enough for him to see the wood inches above his face and quilted white satin to his right and left. He held the instrument in front of his eyes, squinting at it, and pressed a button marked talk.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Pete, Josh, Robbo, Luke, Mark? Enough, OK? Get me out of here, I’m scared.’
He heard a bip-bip-bip and a signal flashed on the display. ‘LOW BATTERY’.
‘You stupid bastards, you could have charged the bloody thing for me! Hello! Hello! Hello!’
Static came back at him.
He tried again, with the same result.
There was another sharp bip-bip-bip. Then the display light went out.
‘God no, please no!’
He pressed the talk button again. Again. Again. Nothing. It was stone dead.
*
Then he remembered his iPhone in his pocket. Slowly, with difficulty, sliding his hand down against the white satin, he reached his pocket and teased the phone out. Then he dropped it. Fumbled. Found it again, brought it to his face and pressed the power button. The display almost dazzled him.
Three minutes past one.
Friday morning.
He was getting married tomorrow.
There was no signal.
A shiver of fear rippled through him. He tried to remember what time they had been in the van. It must have been around 9 p.m. Four hours?
They hadn’t come back. Two hours they had said.
He remembered the scream. The clanging sound.
What the hell had happened?
It was hard to breathe. How much air did he have left?
He pressed the green button on the walkie-talkie again, but still heard no sound. ‘Guys,’ he said. ‘Joke over, OK?’ He was having to suck harder and harder to get air into his lungs. ‘Guys!’ he said desperately. ‘Hey, come on!’
Silence.
He took another long, deep breath that barely filled his lungs.
Ashley darling, he thought. His eyelids were feeling heavy. He was drowsy and calm, and growing drowsier and calmer. His headache had gone. Almost delirious he murmured, ‘Ashley, darling . . . if I’m not there in the church tomorrow, you are so not going to believe my excuse, are you?’
*
The police never found Michael. The boys, who had all died instantly in the crash, had kept their plans such a tight secret that no one else had an inkling what they were going to do that fateful night. It was a secret that Michael, unfortunately, took literally to the grave.
SUN OVER THE YARD ARM
Tony Trollope was a man of routine. He would arrive home from the office at almost exactly the same time every weekday evening, other than when the train from London to Brighton was delayed; kiss his wife, Juliet; ask how the children were and what was for supper. Then he would glance upwards, as if at the masthead of a yacht, and announce, ‘Sun’s over the yard arm!’
That was Juliet’s cue to make him a drink, while he popped upstairs to change – and in earlier days, to see their children in bed.
‘Sun’s over the yard arm’ became, to Juliet, almost like Tony’s mantra. But she had no idea, any more than her husband did, just how ironic those words would be one day.
After a few minutes he would come back downstairs in an oversized cable-stitch sweater, baggy slacks and the battered, rope-soled deck shoes he liked to slob around in at home as much as on their boat. Then he would flop down in his massive recliner armchair, feet up, TV remote beside him and the latest edition of Yachting Monthly magazine open on his lap. A couple of minutes later, Juliet would oblige him with his gin and tonic with ice and a slice of lemon in a highball glass, mixed just how he liked it.
Over the years, as the stress of his commute and his job at the small private bank increased, the quantity of gin got larger and of tonic smaller. And at the weekend the timing of just when exactly the sun appeared over the yard arm steadily reduced from 1 p.m. to midday and then to 11 a.m., regardless of whether they were at home or away on the boat.
‘Eleven in the morning was when sailors in the British Navy traditionally took their tot of rum,’ he was fond of telling Juliet, as if to justify the early hour of his first libation of the day. Frequently he would raise his glass and toast 31 July 1970. ‘A sad day!’ he would say. ‘A very sad day indeed!’
It was the day, he informed her, that the British Navy abolished the traditional tot of rum for all sailors.
‘So you’ve told me many times, darling,’ she would reply patiently. Sometimes she wondered about his memory.
‘Yes, I know I have, but traditions are important, they should never be allowed to die. Now the thing is,’ he would go on to explain, ‘a tot is actually quite a big measure. Half the ship’s company would be totally smashed by midday. That tradition was there for two reasons. Firstly to ward off disease, and secondly, as with many military forces around the globe, to give the sailors courage in combat. Historically, many soldiers went into battle totally off their faces on alcohol or drugs. The Zulu warriors were sky high on drugs during the Zulu wars. Half the US troops in Vietnam faced the enemy stoned on marijuana or heroin. Dutch courage indeed! Didn’t get its name for nothing.’
Tony had never actually been in the Royal Navy, but the sea was in his blood. From the age of ten, when his father had bought him a Cadet dinghy, which he sailed out of Shoreham Harbour near Brighton, he had been smitten with the sea. On their very first date, when he was twenty-three and Juliet was just twenty, he had sat opposite her in the little Brighton trattoria and asked her if she had ever been sailing. She replied that she hadn’t, but was game to try it.
The following weekend he took her out into the Channel on his 22-foot Sonata, the entry-level yacht he had bought with a small inheritance from an uncle. She was instantly smitten – both with Tony and with being out on the open water. And Tony was smitten with her. His previous girlfriend had thrown up fifteen minutes beyond the Shoreham Harbour moles, and had spent the rest of the short voyage lying down below on a bunk, puking into a plastic bucket and wishing she was dead. Sitting in the cramped cockpit of the small boat, he fell in love with Juliet’s sea legs. And with – erm . . . well – her very sexy legs.
And with everything else about her.
Juliet loved that Tony was so manly. Loved that she felt so safe with him out at sea. He knew everything there was to know, it seemed, about the craft of sailing and seamanship. He taught her how to tie a reef knot, a bowline, a round turn and two half hitches, a clove hitch, and helped her create her very own knot board. She learned from him how to navigate with the satnav and then, far more basic, with a sextant. How to read charts. How to learn from the clouds to predict squalls and rain. Tony seemed capable of fixing anything on the boat, from taking the engine apart to sewing torn sails. Gradually, in their modest little craft, they ventured further and further afield. Down the south coast to Chichester, then to the Hamble and up the Beaulieu River, and then further afield still, to Poole and then Torbay.
A promotion at work, coupled with a large year-end bonus, enabled him to splash out on a bigger yacht, with more comfortable accommodation, and a larger stateroom – or master-bonking quarters – as he liked to call it.
A year later he proposed to her on the stern of the Juliet, the Nicholson 27 he had named after her, in Cowes Harbour on the Isle of Wight at the end of the year’s round-the-island race. She accepted without an instant of hesitation. She loved him truly, deeply, as deep as the ocean below them.
As his career advanced and he climbed higher up the corporate ladder and salary scale, their boats became bigger. Big enough to comfortably accommodate their three children as they grew older and larger, culminating in his dream Oyster 42 with hydraulic roller reefing. A substantial yacht that, thanks to all the electronic technology, the two of them could easily handle, with or without the help of their youngsters on board.
And then suddenly, without realizing how time had crept up on them, with two of their children at university and one married, they found themselves planning for Tony’s retirement.
And his dream. To circumnavigate the world. Spending time in each country on the way. America. Then Australia. Then Asia. South Africa. Up through the Suez Canal. Then maybe a couple of years in the Mediterranean. ‘Hey, what does it matter how long we are away?’ he said to her. ‘What’s time to the Irish?’
‘We’re not Irish,’ she replied.
‘So?’
She shrugged. It was a strange thing he had said, she thought. And he had become a little strange, if she was honest with herself, during this past year leading up to his sixty-fifth birthday. She couldn’t place a finger on what it was exactly. He seemed to have become a little distant. Distracted. Grumpier. He had always been good-natured. She used to tell her friends that they had the best marriage, that they never argued, that their sex life was still wonderful.
But there was a wrinkle. Deeper than the ones that gradually appeared over the years on their increasingly weather-beaten faces. Tony began to joke more and more about sailors having a woman in every port. And in his now senior position with the bank, he had become responsible for its overseas client development, which meant he regularly flew around the world. And with each trip, when he returned home, his interest in making love to her seemed to wane further and further.
She tried to put it down to a natural decline in libido as he aged, knowing from discussions with her girlfriends, and from looking it up on the internet, that a man’s testosterone levels diminished as he grew older. Nevertheless, she began to have nagging doubts about what he got up to on the trips, which were becoming even more frequent and often prolonged – very prolonged at times, with some two-day trips turning into a week or even longer. He also became a little furtive, guarding his mobile phone carefully, getting an increasing number of texts at all hours of the day and night, and frequently disappearing to his den to make or take calls.
At dinner one night, with friends, he told a jokey story, but one she did not find particularly funny. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that in naval-base towns like Portsmouth and Southampton, wives of seamen whose husbands were away at sea for long periods of time used to put a pack of OMO washing powder in their front windows to signal to their lovers, Old Man Overseas!’
Everyone laughed, except Juliet. She just stared quizzically at her husband, wondering. Wondering.
For Juliet, the day of his sixty-fifth birthday, and the big retirement party the bank held for him in the City of London, could not come soon enough. Because they had planned their round-the-world sailing trip to start soon after, and they were going to spend the next five glorious years away. They would be together for all that time, and Tony seemed really happy and had spent months planning every last detail and provisioning the yacht.
He told her, repeatedly, how happy he was at the thought of the trip and spending all that time together. She began to think that maybe she had misjudged him, and had been jumping to the wrong conclusions. All those long trips overseas in the past few years had, perhaps, been totally innocent after all. He had just been working as hard as hell to justify his worth to the bank. He was a good man, and she loved him, truly, deeply, as much as ever. More, perhaps. She realized that of all the choices that life had presented to her, nailing her colours to his mast had been the right decision. She began to prepare for the voyage with a sense of excitement and adventure she had not felt since she was a child.
And Tony told her, after a bottle of Champagne celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, and using one of the nautical phrases that were part of his language, that being spliced to her was the best thing that had ever happened in his life.
She and Tony pored over charts, looking at routes that famous round-the-world sailors had taken. Through the Bay of Biscay, around Spain and Portugal, then through the Med and down through the Suez Canal was one option. Another was to carry on after Spain down the coast of Africa. But the one they preferred was to cross the Atlantic first, cruise the East Coast of America, then head through the Panama Canal, down the coast of Ecuador, across to the Galapagos, then Fiji, then circumnavigate Australia, before heading up to Indonesia, then across to South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, over to the East coast of South America, to Brazil, then across to the Canary Islands, Morocco, then home to England.
*
Finally the big day came. Their children, with their own young families now; a large group of friends, who had sponsored them on Just Giving to raise money for the Martlets Hospice in Brighton; a photographer from the local paper, The Argus; a television crew from BBC South, and a chaplain friend, Ish, from Chichester Cathedral, who had renewed their wedding vows on the stern of Juliet 3, were all there to wave them off and wish them luck.
The next two years were, for the most part, a blissfully happy time. They had plenty of scary moments, particularly when they lost their self-steering gear during one severe Atlantic storm, and another when they lost their mainsail off the coast of Florida. But, one by one, they made their destination ports and got things fixed or replaced.
Most importantly for Juliet, Tony and she were getting on better than ever. By the time they berthed in Perth, nearly three years into their voyage, she had never, ever, in all their years, felt so close to this man she loved so much. Enjoying the luxury of a hot shower in a deluxe hotel room, then making love to Tony afterwards and falling asleep in his arms in soft, clean hotel bedding, she decided she never wanted this voyage to end – although she did miss her children and grandchildren. He told her that he didn’t want it to end, either. And why should it? They were in the happy situation of
being able to afford this life at sea – why not continue it for as long as they were both able-bodied?
They only had one real argument. That was when they were in Darwin, three years and six months on, and two more of their grandchildren had been born. Juliet realized that if they did not get back to the UK, at least for a short while, their grandchildren would be total strangers when they finally returned.
It didn’t seem to bother Tony, but it was an increasing concern to her. ‘Why don’t we take a straight route back home, spend a year there, bonding with the kids, then set off again?’ she asked.
‘I really want to go to Singapore first,’ he had replied. ‘We’ve never been and I’ve always wanted to sail there.’
‘But you’ve been there on business,’ she said. ‘Several times. And you always said it wasn’t that special. I asked you one time if I could join you on one of your trips and you said it was too hot and humid, and I wouldn’t like it.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes.’
He had shrugged. ‘It’s so totally different when you arrive by boat, darling,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine what it must have been like for Sir Stamford Raffles when he first arrived there? I’d love to experience that sensation with you.’
For the first time in the voyage, Juliet had bad vibes, which she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – explain. ‘I want to get back to England,’ she insisted. Then she pointed at the chart. ‘We could take that route, couldn’t we? Sri Lanka, then across to Oman, then up the Suez Canal?’
Momentarily he had a far-away look in his eyes. ‘Sri Lanka? I think you’d like it there.’
‘Didn’t you have a client there? You used to go there a lot.’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ And suddenly his whole countenance lit up. ‘Sri Lanka’s a good plan!’