The Tropical Issue (35 page)

Johnson added to me, ‘All right; you’re it. Flasks and sandwiches. Raymond will show you where to put them. And breakfast from daybreak on demand. If it gets rough, we rig lines on deck. You don’t come up without clipping your harness to it. You obey me, or Lenny or Raymond.’

‘Hey,’ said Ferdy. For sailing, he had put on a gung-ho navy hugger and jeans, and natty gold pirate hoops in his ears, matching his two rings and his necklace. ‘Hey, you give orders to Lenny or Raymond. I bags Rita.’

‘You don’t know the ship,’ said Johnson calmly. ‘You’rejust the photographer. We’ll let you know when we’re on a good tack for the
Yachting Monthly
.’

I said, ‘What’s the forecast?’ and Johnson said, ‘Weather.’

They were busier than they seemed. I went below, and raided Lenny’s stores in the galley, and struggled with my catsuit in the head, and sneaked into my cabin to change into a cotton-knit shirt and pants, and a sweatband to keep my hair on.

Maggie was sleeping with her mouth open and gunpowder-green circles under her eyes. You couldn’t tell if it was Ferdy or Valium.

I nearly got into my bunk, but on second thoughts set my rescued digital alarm, and curled up instead on the saloon seat.

I slept, too, and missed the changeover, when Johnson went below and Lenny came up to take the helm. Raymond came down, and woke Maggie, and stayed to eat three of my club sandwiches and down some coffee before he went up and took Lenny’s seat.

The wind was a lot stronger, and so was the bouncing on
Dolly,
which made the sails jar and jiggle. Raymond’s voice yelling orders was drowned out by the noise down below. The radio crackled and spat. At one point, Maggie came down, her hair soaking, and tuned in to Radio St Lucia, which was just signing off at 11.15.

The Meteorological Office at Hewanorra, it announced, had just made it known that Tropical Storm Chloe was now moving west at wind speeds of up to 70 m.p.h. Residents of St Lucia should tune in for further news at six a.m. tomorrow.

She didn’t say anything: just stood pulling at the dripping point of her hair. I said, ‘There’s some fish paella in the dinner-pail thermos. And coffee or punch.’

Her mascara had all streaked in the spray, so that she looked surprised, like a doll. ‘You cooked it? That’s good.’

I didn’t need the pat on the head, but it was no time to be fussy. I gave her a spoon and a plateful and said, ‘How far away is the storm?’

‘About six hundred miles. We should be O.K.,’ she said. ‘Look, Ferdy ought to come down. Tell him you’re serving food.’

I was halfway to the steps when she added, ‘Don’t you think?’

Tropical Storm Chloe, the great equaliser.

It turned out that Ferdy’s mind was running more on rum punch than on food, but I’d plenty of that as well, and he duly came down. He then came into the galley to inspect the paella, and we were comparing notes about squid when someone rapped on the doorpost and said, ‘Be quiet a minute, will you?’

You do what you’re told, when you’re in the path of a tropical storm. I felt my heart thud. Ferdy stepped quietly outside, and I followed him.

Johnson was up, and bent over the radio-telephone, with Raymond and Maggie beside him. It wasn’t producing storm warnings: just a great roar of quacking static. Every now and then, Johnson would move a switch and speak into it himself, but if he’d got any response once, he’d lost it.

He straightened after a bit. ‘No good. Where’s the chart?’

‘What?’ said Ferdy.

Maggie answered. ‘Boat in trouble. Holiday cruiser. We can’t get proper details.’

‘Where?’ said Ferdy.

Johnson looked up. ‘Between us and Chloe.’

‘Anyone else around?’ said Ferdy.

Johnson said, ‘Look for yourself. There’s the radar.’

There was no one else around. Not with Chloe approaching, there wouldn’t be. The arm swivelled round, bleeping every time it passed this speck to the east.

Ferdy said, ‘How long will it take us to reach her?’

‘Into the wind? We’d have to motor. Drinking fuel, of course. But I think we could pick her up and still make it. Anyway, we can’t leave her,’ said Johnson, with finality.

Which of course we couldn’t. Not a powerless boat, with those winds approaching.

On engine, in rising seas,
Dolly
stopped being a lady. She stopped doing her best to skim along on one glossy ear, and rolled and pitched and wallowed, with her propeller fizzing out of the water, and her bottom coming down on every fourth or fifth wave with a thud.

Johnson steered, his shirt stuck to the nylon of his oilskins, tipping her up and round and over the waves like a sculptor.

After a while, my back ached with the jarring, and I saw Raymond watching Johnson uneasily.

I remembered Maggie’s method and, handing myself off the woodwork, struggled down below and came up with the rest of the sandwiches in a bag, and something to cut them with, and some mugs and a quart flask of coffee.

Lenny said, ‘Here. Let me, Miss,’ and handed them round, while Raymond put his hand casually on the wheel and said, ‘Rita’s specials. Take one while you’ve got the chance.’

Johnson gave up the wheel without comment, and slithered over to where he could brace himself better against the ship’s bucketing. I admired him, rather, for admitting defeat, although Raymond wasn’t nearly as good at the helm as he was.

Ferdy ate half the sandwiches, and then hopped down and fetched us some punch, which was a help too. Then Johnson leaned forward and called, ‘I think we have her in view. Let’s have some light.’

The rain had stopped. In the dimness of the cockpit, Raymond had his binoculars up as well. His wet yellow hair had gone like brown varnish.

Then we all saw it: a collection of lights tossing up and down like dropped stars beyond us. Raymond flicked on a switch.

A brilliant searchlight sprang from
Dolly’s
prow. And there, heaving and wallowing in the distance, was the disabled ship, a motor cruiser with no engine power.

Not a boat you’d see in Monte Carlo, or visiting with the Royal Barbados Yacht Club. A biggish, shabby boat, probably under charter, with rust on her sides, and a good deal of chipped paint, and some people in oilskins and some in soaked cottons waving to us. I counted five or six, and other faces at the portholes below.

They were flinging their arms about and yelling in a foreign language. They looked pretty happy to see us. I hoped they also realised what Johnson had done for them. And right away began to wonder how much it would slow us down, towing this thing behind us to harbour.

Johnson said, ‘We’ll send Lenny over. He may be able to fix their engine.’

Mind-reader. He took a loud-hailer from Lenny, and began addressing the other boat in what seemed to be its own language. Spanish, perhaps.

The other boat answered, and as the two ships bounced towards each other, fenders began to appear, and a rope spun through the air, to be caught and made fast for winching. Warped together, the cruiser and
Dolly
got closer.

On the other ship, they’d found a loud-hailer as well, and the captain, young and tanned and bare-headed, came to the rail of his own ship and used it.

He spoke English too.

He said,
‘We board on your ship. You try to stop us, we kill you.’

People say that kind of thing in films. It doesn’t happen for real. We were all standing or kneeling on
Dolly,
in the cockpit or on the side decks. We just all went on standing or kneeling, and looking at this guy making threats at us.

Except Raymond. He believed it. He moved.

There was a crack; a whine; and a shower of splinters jumped into the darkness from the mast at Raymond’s side.

We all saw the red flame come and go on the opposite deck. There were a lot of men standing there now. Twelve, perhaps. And most of them held, pointing at us, these long shiny rifles that give producers such headaches.

Like the severed head, it was quite different when it was real.

‘The next time,’ said the captain, ‘you be killed. No person move.’

We were so close now, we could hear him without the loud-hailer. Without moving, Johnson spoke.

No drama. He just said, ‘There’s a hurricane coming.’

We were near enough now to see the captain’s white smile. ‘One tropical storm. Is nothing. We have one good engine.’

Their ship had never been in trouble. Their distress call had been a hoax.

I looked at Raymond, at Lenny, at Maggie. None of them looked at me. They all stared, as if silly, at the rifles.

Johnson said, ‘Rita, keep still. You, sir. What do you want?’

The captain was smiling again.

‘I think,’ said the captain, ‘we have no rum. You have rum a bordo? We come a bordo and you give to us your rum. You move, we shoot.’

Ferdy said, ‘To hell with that.’

He was a big man, with the feet of a footballer. He knew we were six against twelve. Being the sort of man he was, sheer blind fury at being assaulted by wogs was more than enough to make him forget it.

He was also, of all of us, the one nearest the controls for the idling engine.

As he spoke, he plunged forward. He kicked the big Mercedes-Benz into gear. He scooped up the sandwich-knife and, rising, hurled himself at the poop warp.

It was one of two, and even if the knife had sawn through,
Dolly
would still have been held by the other, or for as long as it took to aim rifles.

As it was, he didn’t even get the rope frayed. Somewhere in all the noise, a rifle popped. A lot of extra wet suddenly appeared on Ferdy’s smart hugger. He let go the knife and lost balance backwards, down the shallow steps into the saloon.

I saw the honeycomb soles of his shoes, and his eyes, looking scared as he fell. I saw Maggie move to help him and stop, and so did I. The voice from the other ship said briefly, ‘Engine off. Or else.’

Johnson put it off quietly and stood by the wheel, half blocking my view of the gunmen. The sea slapped and jumped between the two ships. They touched fenders, and shuddered, and heaved up and down.

‘We board on you,’ said the other captain.

Since they didn’t mind how much the two ships battered together, they jumped from their rail to
Dolly’s
with no special trouble.

Eight of them came aboard. They hadn’t come up against soap and water for a long time, and they were pretty funnily dressed, some of them, but they weren’t in want, to look at their rings and their watches.

I had heard, right enough, of freelance enterprise in the Caribbean. Present-day pirates, high on hash, who cruised about the rich playgrounds, robbing the fancy yachts.

I wondered what on earth a bunch of Spaniards could be hoping for, from a yacht like the
Dolly.

I supposed, with their distress signal as bait, they were out for anything they could grab. And there was plenty of gear on the
Dolly,
if they knew how to dismantle it.

I thought it was a pity that they had shown us their faces, although, on the other hand, killing the six of us would be quite a risk.

I realised, as the boats lurched and banged, that they didn’t even have to kill us, as Tropical Storm Chloe was approaching at fifteen m.p.h. to solve their problem for them. I am never sick at sea. I began to feel sick at sea.

I had forgotten to think of rape, until the first two or three jumped on the side deck, and one of them took hold of Maggie, and ripped all her buttons off, down to her all-over tan.

It was the worst thing that could have happened, because it made our men flip. Lenny forgot everything and went for Maggie’s attackers as if she had been a bloody virgin, and so did Raymond.

The pirates didn’t shoot Lenny or Raymond. They just clubbed them with the end of their guns and left them, half in, half out of the cockpit. Then they lifted up Maggie and threw her on to the cockpit cushions while the captain jumped in and sat down beside her, with his rifle pointed at Johnson’s oilskin.

The man who had spoken on the loud-hailer was quite young: not more than twenty-five, and his face was wide across the cheekbones and looked more Indian than Spanish. I put its colour at Max Factor Bronze Tone Latin Men. He had on frayed denim shorts and an expensive sweater shirt, with a necklet and a couple of rings that didn’t come out of Woolies.

He looked at me, grinned, and looked back at Johnson. Behind him, Maggie was silently fighting off one of the explorers, who was interested in getting the rest of her clothes off. A number of men shoved past us all and down into the saloon where, finding Ferdy in the way, they slung him where I couldn’t see him, somewhere off the passage.

I heard him grunt as they did it, and saw Johnson’s head turn as well.

Ferdy was alive, then, but how badly hurt, you couldn’t tell. You couldn’t imagine the planter’s punch and the sandwiches all lying there, doing him no good. And the tongue staying inside his own mouth, that used to have such fun at the end of its leash.

But you couldn’t have imagined Kim-Jim lying shot, either. You looked at people in mortuaries, but they didn’t belong to you.

The captain was getting bumped by the struggle behind him with Maggie. He snapped something in Spanish, and then something else, and the guy she was fending off got up and then staggered back as she kicked him.

The boat was rocking so much that if you didn’t hang on, you would spend your time rolling about the floor. The captain freed one hand from his gun and, turning round, slapped Maggie’s head hard.

I heard her teeth jar, and saw her eyes roll up. She wasn’t quite out, but as near it as made no difference. The captain shouted in Spanish, raising his voice more this time, and a man appeared on the rail of his own ship, stuffing something into his pocket, and vaulted over, shouting something in reply.

He came down into the cockpit, still talking, and I saw Johnson’s eyes hadn’t moved from him.

I don’t understand Spanish. I hardly understand English. But I understood the word ‘Chloe’.

Whatever else was said, it made the captain stop and think. Then he rapped out an order, and the guy who’d just come hauled some twine out of his pocket, and a knife, and tied Maggie’s hands and ankles together.