I could go beserk and smash up the place, I thought, or calm down again and eat whatever he’d brought in the carrier: and the fact that I’d recognised the choice made it certain I’d choose the latter. The bitter frustrated fury didn’t exactly go away, but at least with a sigh I had it back in control.
The intensity of what I’d felt, and its violent unexpected onset, both alarmed me. I would have to be careful, I thought. There were so many roads to destruction, and rage, it seemed, was one of them.
If a psychiatrist had been shut up like this, I wondered, would he have had any safety nets that I hadn’t? Would his knowledge of what might happen to the mind of someone in this position help him to withstand the symptoms when they occurred? Probably I should have studied psychology, not accountancy. More useful if one were kidnapped. Stood to reason.
The carrier contained two de-shelled hard boiled eggs, an apple, and three small foil-wrapped triangles of processed cheese. I saved one of the eggs and two pieces of cheese for later, in case he meant it about no supper.
He did mean it. Uncountable hours passed. I ate the second egg and the rest of the cheese. Drank some water. As the day’s total entertainment, hardly a riot.
When the hatch was next opened, it was dark outside, though dark with a luminous greyness quite unlike the black inside the cabin. No carrier of food materialised, and I gathered that the respite was only so that I shouldn’t asphyxiate. He had opened the hatch and gone before I got round to risking any more questions.
Gone...
The hatch was wide open. Out on the deck there were voices and a good deal of activity with ropes and sails.
‘Let go.’
‘You’re letting the effing thing fall into the sea...’
‘Catch that effing sheet... Move, can’t you...’
‘You’ll have to stow the gennie along the rail...’
Mostly his voice, from close by, directing things.
I put one foot on the thigh-high rim of the sail bin, as he had done, and hooked my hands over the side of the hatch, and heaved. My head popped out into the free world and it was about two whole seconds before he noticed.
‘Get back,’ he said brusquely, punctuating his remark by stamping on my fingers. ‘Get down and stay down.’ He kicked at my other hand. ‘Do you want a bash on the head?’ He was holding a heavy chromium winch handle, and he swung it in an unmistakable gesture.
‘There’s no land in sight,’ he said, kicking again. ‘So get down.’
I dropped back to the floor, and he shut the hatch. I hugged my stinging fingers and counted it fortunate that no one went sailing in hob-nailed boots.
Two seconds uninterrupted view of the boat had been worth it, though. I sat on the lid of the loo with my feet on the side of the lower bunk opposite, and thought about the pictures still alive on my retinas. Even in night light, with eyes adjusted to a deeper darkness, I’d been able to see a good deal.
For a start, I’d seen three men.
The one I knew, who seemed to be not only in charge of me but of the whole boat. Two others, both young, hauling in a voluminous sail which hung half over the side, pulling it in with stretching arms and trying to stop it billowing again once they’d got it on deck.
There might be a fourth one steering: I hadn’t been able to see. About ten feet directly aft of the hatch the single mast rose majestically skywards, and with all the cleats and pulleys and ropes clustered around its base it had formed a block to any straight view towards the stern. There might have been a helmsman and three or four crewmen resting below. Or there might have been automatic steering and all hands visible on deck. It seemed a huge boat, though, to be managed by three.
From the roughest of guesses and distant gleams from chromium winches I would have put it at about a cricket pitch long. Say sixty-five feet. Or say, if you preferred it, nineteen point eight one metres. Give or take an octave.
Not exactly a nippy little dinghy for Sunday afternoons on the Thames. An ocean racer, more like.
I had had a client once who had bought himself a second hand ocean racer. He’d paid twenty-five thousand for thirty feet of adventure, and beamed every time he thought of it. His voice came back over the years: ‘The people who race seriously have to buy new boats every year. There’s always something new. If they don’t get a better boat they can’t possibly win, and the possibility of winning is what it’s all about. Now me, all I want is to be able to sail round Britain comfortably at weekends in the summer. So I buy one of the big boys’ cast-offs, because they’re well built boats, and just the job.’ He had once invited me to Sunday lunch on board. I had enjoyed looking over his pride and joy, but privately had been most relieved when a sudden gale had prevented us leaving the moorings at his yacht club for the promised afternoon’s sail.
Highly probable, I thought, that I was now being entertained on some other big boy’s cast-off. The great question was, at whose expense?
The improvement in the weather was a mixed blessing, because the engine started again. The din seemed an even worse assault on my nerves than it had at the beginning. I lay on the bunk and tried to shut my ears with the pillow and my fingers, but the roaring vibration easily by-passed such frivolous barriers. I’d either got to get used to it and ignore it, I thought, or go raving screaming bonkers.
I got used to it.
Wednesday. Was it Wednesday? I got food and air twice. I said nothing to him, and he said nothing to me. The constant noise of the engine made talking difficult. Wednesday was a black desert.
Thursday. I’d been there a week.
When he opened the hatch, I shouted, ‘Is it Thursday?’
He looked surprised. Hesitated, then shouted back, ‘Yes.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Quarter to eleven.’
He was wearing a blue cotton tee shirt, and the day outside seemed fine. The light tended to hurt my eyes.
I untied the carrier and fastened on the previous one, which as usual contained an empty water bottle. I looked up at him as he pulled it out, and he stared down at my face. He looked his normal unsmiling self: a hard young man, unfeeling rather than positively brutal.
I didn’t consciously ask him, but after a pause, during which he seemed to be inspecting the horizon, he began to fix the hatch as he had done on the first day, so that it was a uniform three inches above the deck, letting in continuous air and light.
The relief at not being locked back in the dark was absolutely shattering. I found I was trembling from head to foot. I swallowed, trying to guard against the possibility that he would change his mind. Trying to tell myself that even if it proved to be only for five minutes, I should be grateful for that.
He finished securing the hatch and went away. I took some shaky deep breaths and gave myself an ineffective lecture about stoical responses, come dark, come shine.
After a while I sat on the lid of the loo and ate the first shipboard meal that I could actually see. Two hard boiled eggs, some crispbread, three triangles of cheese and an apple. Never much variety in the diet, but at least no one intended me to starve.
He came back about half an hour after he’d gone away.
Hell, I thought. Half an hour. Be grateful for that. I had at least talked myself into facing another dose of darkness without collapsing into rubble.
He didn’t, however, shut the hatch. Without altering the way it was fixed, he slid another plastic carrier through the gap. It was not this time tied to a rope, because when he let go of it, it fell to the floor; and before I could raise any remark, he had gone again.
I picked up the carrier, which seemed light and almost empty, and looked inside.