A Twist of the Knife

  She wept uncontrollably. ‘Tony, please don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me. Not here. Don’t, please no!’

  She stared up at the dark grey sky. And then at the expanse of dark green ocean all around them, which stretched out to the horizon in every direction. According to the chart, Christmas Island was a couple of hundred nautical miles behind them. Sri Lanka was still well over a thousand miles ahead of them. Indonesia was several hundred miles to starboard. It would be days of sailing to reach them, days taking her away from the most direct route home.

  Tony was dead. She had to accept that, she knew. It wasn’t going to make any difference whether it was a few days now, or two weeks. Her best option, she decided, was to keep to their course, and hope that her Mayday had been heard. If she saw a commercial ship or another yacht on the horizon, or if a plane flew overhead, she would fire off one of the flares they had on board. Her best hope was that her distress signal had been picked up, but she wasn’t confident about that.

  Maybe a helicopter would appear? But she was pretty sure they were out of range for one. Then, cursing herself for forgetting it, she swore aloud as she suddenly remembered Tony’s satellite phone.

  ‘Of course! How could I be so stupid?’ It didn’t need a mast! Tony had bought it for emergencies, justifying the expense by telling her that even if they lost all their electrics, they could still use it to call for help.

  She clambered back down into the saloon, and found it safely stowed in the cupboard to the right of the chart table. She unclipped it, studied it for some moments, then pressed the power button. After a few moments, the display came on. Several symbols appeared, one showing that there was 80 per cent of the battery life left. Then, to her dismay, there was a request for the code.

  And she had no sodding idea what that was.

  ‘For God’s sake, Tony,’ she cursed under her breath. ‘Why the hell did you need a pass code?’

  Then she remembered a piece of wisdom Tony had once given her a long time ago, and that was to never panic. Panic was what killed people, he had said. Survivors of disasters were those who were able to keep calm and clear-headed, no matter how bad the situation they faced.

  And bad situations did not get much worse than the one she was currently in.

  ‘Good advice, Tony!’ she said aloud. Doing her best to keep calm and clear-headed, she thought about the pass codes they had always used. The one for their burglar alarm at home was the first one that came to mind. Her year of birth: 1954. Whenever they had stayed in a hotel anywhere and there was a code required for the safe in the room, they had used the same one: 1954.

  She tapped the numbers in expectantly. But all she got was an angry buzz and the display shook.

  Sod it! Why the hell hadn’t he used that one? Just to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake she entered it again. And got the same response.

  She stared at the phone, thinking. She knew there were settings on some phones that only permitted you a limited number of tries at a pass code before locking you out. How many did this allow?

  What the hell might he have used? On such an important phone, it must be a sequence of numbers that he would remember easily. What about his date of birth?

  She entered 1948, and instantly got the same angry buzz and short, sharp shake of the display.

  ‘Stupid bastard!’ she said, out aloud this time. What else? She tried the numbers backwards. Same result. She tried her own date of birth backwards. Same result again. Then she shouted at the phone. ‘Come on, you are my sodding lifeline! Give me your bloody code!’

  It required four numbers. How many sodding combinations of four numbers could there be? She started trying, at random, different sequences. His birth date, day and month: 1607. Day and year: 1648. Then her own. Then 0000. Each time she got the same response.

  ‘Please!’ she said. ‘Oh God, please let me in.’

  She took the phone up on deck and saw, to her alarm, that they had veered way off course whilst she had been below. She brought the boat back round onto the correct heading, but the wind had dropped so much that she was barely making any progress at all. She needed to get some sail up, or else start the engine and motor, but she was worried about the amount of fuel they were carrying. She had always left that to Tony, but remembered that he had always been careful not to run the engine for longer than necessary. He always told her that they needed to conserve their fuel for charging up the boat’s batteries and for entering and leaving ports. Juliet 3 was a sailing yacht, not a power boat. They did not have long-range fuel tanks. How far would their fuel take her, she wondered?

  The mainsail was useless, way beyond repair, one large strip of it listlessly flapping around Tony’s body, like a shroud, before slipping away and fluttering around. She would have to sail under the jib, because when she did reach Columbo harbour at Sri Lanka, she would sure as hell need to motor in – she didn’t have the skills to go in under sail.

  She freed the jib sheet from the cleat, then pulled hard to unfurl it. After a few minutes of exertion, the massive sail was fully extended and filled with the wind that was coming from the stern. She could feel the boat accelerating forwards, and watched the needle on the dial steadily climb from one knot to three. The mainsail, now a huge, tattered rag, flapped uselessly.

  Three knots, she thought. How long would it take to get to their destination, sailing with only the jib, making seventy-two nautical miles a day? Somewhere between two to three weeks. She stared, warily, up at her husband’s motionless body. Then, in a sudden fit of anger, she shouted up at him, ‘You want medical help, Tony? Give me your sodding phone code!’

  Then she wept again. She had not prayed for years, not since she was a child. But suddenly, she found herself pressing her hands against her face and praying.

  ‘Oh God, please help us. Please help us.’

  As if in answer, she suddenly heard a horrible, ugly cry above her. ‘Aaarrrggghh! Aaarrrrggghh!’ She looked up and saw a gull-like bird with a sinister hooded face, as if it was wearing a mask. Spooking her, it circled the boat several times, unfazed by the sail that continued to wrap around Tony’s body then flap away, free, again. After a few minutes, slowly, unhurriedly, it soared away.

  Did the bird mean she was closer to land than she realized, she wondered?

  She watched it warily, until it became a tiny speck, remembering, suddenly, the albatross in the ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. Was it bad luck to see a gull, too? There was a country superstition in England that it was bad luck to see just one magpie, you needed to see another quickly. Did the same apply to gulls?

  Shakily, she went below again to try the satnav and radio once more, but the satellite navigation screen was just a mass of squiggly lines and the radio continued to produce nothing but a buzz of static. She gave up on them and instead tried to study the chart, to see how far they were from the nearest port. But for several minutes, sitting at the chart table, all she could do was cry, her grief pouring out. She felt so alone, so scared and almost as if nothing mattered any more. She had lost the man she loved. Lost their life. The easiest thing would be to climb back up the steps, go to the rear of the cockpit, haul herself over the stern rail and let go.

  But then she thought about her children and her grandchildren, and dabbed her eyes, blotted up the tears that had fallen onto the chart and did her best to pull herself together. It was having no one to talk to – no one at all – that was the worst thing at this moment. No one to share her grief or fear with. And the prospect of two weeks like this. Two weeks of sailing, with Tony stuck up there by the spreaders, in the full glare of the sun when it came out. There had to be a way to get him down.

  Had to. Please God.

  She studied the chart carefully and took measurements. Indonesia was definitely a lot closer than Sri Lanka. Five or six days’ sailing instead of about fourteen. But she wasn’t confident enough about her navigation skills to risk changing course. She could have programmed the satnav if that had
been working, but although Tony had taught her how to plot a course, calculating currents and, where relevant, tides, she didn’t trust herself enough to do it alone. And for a start, she didn’t even know her exact position.

  If the sky had been clear, with the sun or stars out, she might have been able to figure out her exact position from the sextant. But there was only thick, unbroken cloud. Tony had drawn, in pencil, a circle around their last position, which he had plotted yesterday evening. There was no land showing, although she knew that if she just steered a course east she would be almost bound to reach somewhere on the Indonesian coast – the country virtually formed a barrier in that direction.

  But that would be taking her off the planned course, and she could not be sure of landfall remotely near anywhere that had an airport. At least if she kept going towards Sri Lanka she would be heading closer to home. And when she reached there she could find an undertaker and fly home with her husband.

  Although, she suddenly remembered in her misery, Tony had always told her that he wanted to be buried at sea, and she had promised him that if he pre-deceased her, she would arrange that. How ironic, she thought now, that he had died at sea, doing what he loved, and she wasn’t able to get him down and do at least that.

  Perhaps, if the authorities permitted it in Sri Lanka, she could arrange it there?

  Maybe, she wondered, they were closer to land than she thought. How far could gulls fly from land? Thousands of miles? Perhaps. Some birds flew great distances when they migrated, didn’t they? Where had that one, with its sinister hooded face, come from?

  She went back up on deck, swung the wheel to bring them back on course, then looked at the broken self-steering mechanism, wondering if there was any way she could fix it. But she could see that a whole central cog had ripped away. Nothing short of welding was going to fix it.

  She resigned herself to having to man the helm for as long as she could, and sleeping for as little as possible.

  The sun was high in the sky now and, despite the light breeze, it was sweltering on deck. She tried to look up, but the sight of the lifeless body of the man she had loved so much swinging around in the bosun’s chair, and the creepy sail that kept furling around him like a shroud, was too much for her to bear. Instead she stared, steely-eyed, ahead, her gaze fixed on the far horizon beyond the prow of the vessel.

  After half an hour, she suddenly saw two tiny specks, high in the sky, heading towards her. For an instant her hopes rose. Helicopters? But then, a few minutes later, her spirits sank again; she could see from their motion that they were birds.

  And as they got closer still she could see their masked faces. Was it the one she had seen before returning with a friend? Keeping one eye on the compass binnacle, she watched the birds circling, soaring around in a wide loop, then a tighter loop. Then a tighter one still.

  She felt a sudden prick of anxiety as they began to circle her husband’s body. Tighter and tighter, showing increasing interest.

  ‘Sod off, birds!’ she called out.

  Then one darted at his face, made a pecking motion and flew away. Then the other flew in and pecked.

  ‘Sod off! Go away! Don’t touch him!’

  Suddenly she saw more dark specks on the horizon. She counted five, six, seven, eight, ten?

  Within minutes there were a dozen gulls swarming around her husband, all pecking at his face.

  ‘NOOOOO!’ she screamed. She swung the helm wildly left and right, heeling the boat over to port then to starboard. But it made no difference to the birds. They were crying out, a hideous caw-caw-caw shriek, batting each other with their wings, darting in, pecking at Tony’s eyes, lips, nose, ears.

  ‘NOOOOOOOOOO!’

  She locked the wheel and hurried down below, opened the locker where they kept the six emergency flares, unclipped them and clambered up on deck with them. There were even more gulls now, hideous creatures with demon faces, all fighting each other for a morsel of his face.

  She held up one flare, trying to read the instructions, but her hands were shaking so much the tiny print was just a blur. Finally she succeeded, aimed the flared directly at them and pulled the small plastic ring. There was a sharp whoosh, and it fired, sending something like a firework rocket shooting up, well wide of the gulls, high into the sky before exploding in a sheet of red light. They took no notice at all.

  ‘GO AWAY YOU BASTARDS!’ she screamed and seized another flare.

  She aimed again, pulled the loop, and this time scored a bullseye, sending it right into their midst. It hit one gull in the belly, then arced down into the sea, exploding as it struck the water off her port beam. The gull spiralled downwards, helicoptering, unconscious or dead, and landed motionless on the water. As if in wild panic, all the other gulls, cawing in anger and confusion, scattered and flew off towards the horizon.

  She was shaking uncontrollably. The motionless gull passed by the port side and soon was way behind her. ‘Bloody serves you right, you ghoul,’ she muttered.

  Ten minutes later the gulls returned, some singly, others in groups. Now there seemed even more than before. She fired off another flare, but she was shaking so much she missed altogether. Ignoring it totally, the gulls were now on a feeding frenzy.

  Tears were running down her face, blinding her as she fired off another flare, then another, with no effect. She realized now she had only one left. She couldn’t fire it, she needed to preserve it in case she saw a ship on the horizon. It would be her last hope, she knew. The nightmare of Tony dying, which she could not have imagined getting any worse, now had. She had to stop these vulture birds, but how?

  She clambered forwards, gripped the mast and desperately, using all her strength, tried to climb the narrow aluminium pole. She felt a splat of bird shit on her forehead. Then another. The din of their cries above her was almost deafening.

  She screamed at them, again and again and again. Gripping the mast with her arms and her legs she made it up a few feet, but then, obstructed by the rigging and parts of the ripped sail flapping in her face, she could get no higher.

  She slid back down, weeping uncontrollably, and returned to the cockpit. They were heading wildly off course. She turned the wheel and watched the compass needle slowly swing back round. She shouted at the birds until she was hoarse, but it made no difference.

  The gulls stayed until there was nothing left of his face to peck, and then, as dusk began to fall, they gradually, some singly, some in pairs, flapped away into the falling darkness.

  High up above her, swinging in the bosun’s chair, was her husband’s skull, with a rictus grin and patches of hair on the scalp.

  Her stomach was burning, but the rest of her felt numb. Totally numb. She prayed. Prayed that she would wake up and find this had all been just a nightmare.

  The gulls returned soon after dawn. Now they were pecking through his clothes, bits of fabric from his orange Henri Lloyd yachting jacket fluttered in the air as they greedily found the flesh beneath it.

  By the end of the third day, Tony resembled a scarecrow.

  *

  It was twelve more days and nights before, in the early afternoon, she finally saw the lighthouse, the long, welcoming concrete harbour arms of the port of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and a speed limit sign. She was utterly exhausted, almost out of her mind from lack of sleep, and during the past two days she had started speaking out aloud to Tony, holding imaginary conversations with him. The gulls had long departed, having, she presumed, picked his carcass clean. Some bits of his clothes still clung, raggedly, to his skeleton.

  There was no wind on this searing hot afternoon, and fortunately, the strip of sail had once more furled around Tony, almost completely covering him. She was motoring, the fuel gauge on empty, praying there was enough left to get her to a berth in the yacht basin that she had found identified on the harbour chart and marked in red by Tony. She was thankful, at least, for his meticulous planning.

  Through bloodshot eyes, behind sunglasses that
were long fogged with salt, she watched the bunkering stations pass by, cranes, a huge lumber warehouse and an endless line of berthed container ships and tankers. Then finally, to her relief, she saw a whole forest of yacht masts through a gap to starboard and headed towards them.

  Fifteen minutes later, passing a refuelling station, she saw a sign for visitors’ berths and, slowing her speed to a crawl, scrambled forward and removed a bow line from its locker, then pulled out several fenders and hung them over the side. She wasn’t sure how she was going to manage the actual berthing, though.

  Then, to her relief, an elderly man in a battered peaked cap, with the appearance of a port official, suddenly appeared, signalling to her with his arms. She threw him the bow line, which he caught expertly and secured around a bollard. Moments later he caught the stern line and secured that, and steadily, as if he had done it a thousand times before, reeled her in alongside the pontoon.

  Sobbing with relief, she did not think she had ever been so happy to see another human being in her life.

  She jumped ashore and then, pointing towards the top of the mast at Tony’s remains, tried to explain what had happened. But he spoke no English and failed to take any notice of her gesticulations, nor did he look up. All he kept saying, repeatedly and insistently through a sparse set of yellow teeth, one gold and several missing, was ‘You Passeport? Passeport? You papers? Papers, documentation?’

  She went below, found the boat’s papers and her passport and handed them to him. Signalling he would be back, he hurried off. She stood on the deck, watching him head towards a cluster of buildings, shaking with relief that she was no longer at sea. As she had sailed in, she had passed several yachts flying British flags. If she walked along, with luck she would find someone who could tell her where to find the British consul, or at least let her use their phone.