How To Be Brave (11 page)

Food and water were, of course, what all the men craved most. But sitting to record his thoughts at the end of the day, losing everything in the act of doing so, had been heaven. It somehow put the hours to rest.

Colin settled back for the last ten minutes of their lookout, but Young Fowler grabbed his arm and pointed wordlessly astern.

‘Shark,’ he said softly, as though the creature might hear and attack.

A triangular fin approached the boat, cutting through the water with expert precision, a metal blade pulled towards their magnet. Once it reached the craft, the shark circled slowly as though assessing what was to be had. Perhaps fifteen feet long, his hefty body was scarred. One wound cut his face almost in two, like a forward slash dividing lines of poetry. One of the lads – Colin was never sure who – cried out
Scarface
. And so he was named. They would see him often. He became as constant a companion as the sea and sky and thirst.

This time Scarface merely circled the boat and swam back off in the direction he’d arrived. Silence fell upon the crew at his departure.

Colin knew their inner questions must echo his. What had stopped him attacking? Maybe their number? He was sure the creature would return. He’d heard of cases of sharks attacking boats up to ten yards in length, much bigger than theirs. But it wasn’t common. Humans are not preferred prey for sharks but that didn’t mean they were safe.

‘Right, next lookout,’ announced Officer Scown. ‘Ken and John, you’re up.’

Colin retired from his duty wishing he could continue. Looking for a ship was all he wanted to do. Even with men on shift, he scanned the horizon, only stopping when Officer Scown announced the evening meal. Platten measured the rations and they ate. Despite the day’s cruel heat, the roughness of their salty clothes and the small portions, the men chatted contentedly afterwards as though it was a tea break aboard the
Lulworth Hill
.

‘I wonder how long it’ll be before we get another cig,’ said Leak, one of the gunners. He’d lost his dentures when the ship sank and the words whistled and vibrated against his bare gums.

‘Who knows?’ said Stewart. He’d been stark naked save for his life jacket when Ken and Colin fished him out of the water yesterday. The men had ribbed him for it since, laughing as they shared spare clothes with him.

‘I think we’ll be picked up,’ said Weekes.

‘The
Lulworth Hill
was an unlucky ship,’ said Bott.

‘I’ll not have you talk about her that way.’ Officer Scown held up a hand. ‘She was a
fine
ship. One of the best I sailed in. No ship could have outdone that U-boat, I tell you.’

Most nodded an agreement, some adding that they had enjoyed every moment aboard her. They talked of happy days going about their duties while heading home. Behind them the sun began its descent, snatching Colin’s good mood and taking it down too.

Two days and no ship. He had to imagine day three would bring one or else he’d not want to wake in the morning.

Ken had fashioned a good spear and in the evening’s softer light he jabbed viciously at the water, while the crew encouraged him with hearty cries of, ‘Go on, lad!’ But he caught nothing and gave up after ten minutes, the fatigue at engaging in such a simple act too much now.

Ken, like Colin, preferred to keep occupied. He tore pieces of material from the sail and began a log, writing as follows:

Darkness suffocated the boat, put out the day and hushed words. The moon’s absence balanced them. Black shadows they all became, none older or younger or hungrier or less injured than the next man.

After a while Ken said to John Arnold, ‘Say a prayer, lad,’ arousing crude insults.

‘What harm in it?’ demanded Ken. ‘I could use some peaceful words to calm my mind.’

‘God can’t help us now,’ said Bott.

‘Maybe not,’ said Platten, ‘but maybe it’ll help us help ourselves.’

‘Aye, let him say something,’ said Colin.

And so a peace settled again over the crew and Young Arnold recited a bible passage from memory.
And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life. And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth. God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas
.

Then Arnold asked God to receive those who had perished on the
Lulworth Hill
and to bless those who had survived and help them find their way home again. Murmurs of Amen concluded his words, and then twelve men groaned and turned over and tried to find a comfortable spot.

Scown and King began their night lookout shift. Colin tried to sleep, squashed hard between Ken and Davies, whose broken ribs caused him to cry out constantly. Scown had tried to bind his chest with trousers but it can’t have lessened his suffering much.

The sea got up quite a storm and pushed and pulled at their boat, like a tired parent rocking a sleepless baby too hard. Colin dozed fitfully.

Curious visions punctuated brief moments of sleep. A place he’d not seen before but that felt somehow familiar. Not home, but somewhere homely. A place with books, ones he’d never beheld before. Their spines were more colourful than the royal blue and burgundy ones in the ship’s library. He longed to look at one but, as is the way with dreams, he found his hands stupid and clumsy.

Then Colin realised he wasn’t alone. Someone came for the books. Someone turned, perhaps aware of him. He tried desperately to hang on to the dream but it dissolved, the way Bovril tablets do in boiling water. Colin woke with words in his mouth, with names, questions, desperate appeals.

‘What’s that, lad?’ said Ken, his voice muffled.

‘I … she…’ He realised he had no idea. ‘Just a dream.’

‘Go back to sleep,’ said his chum. ‘You’re on shift at dawn.’

But Colin didn’t sleep again. When shreds of orange peel announced day three on the horizon, he was relieved to begin another lookout. It was like the act of watching for a ship encouraged one to arrive. If he turned away, even for a moment, it might pass by unseen.

Hold on, hold on, just hold on,
he thought.
Maybe a ship, maybe a ship, maybe today a ship.

December arrived quietly. Like a wintry tooth fairy, she sneaked in and put frosty days under my pillow. I only realised when I tore a page from the Cute Animals calendar Rose had picked, revealing puppies in Santa hats. What had happened to November? She had passed on a choppy sea of needles and numbers and insulin measurements and battles with Rose and school problems.

It was the month I had become a storyteller. I had tried to choose the right language for a nine-year-old, and insulted my clever daughter. Then I’d worried that I was summarising too much, giving little background, painting in broad strokes, repeating descriptions previously used.

But somehow I took us to the ocean.

Now my private, frenzied reading of Grandad Colin’s diary, newspaper articles and letters, along with Rose’s sharp, probing questions and a rise in confidence that my words were helping her, meant I looked forward to finding out about him. I think Rose did too, secretly. She might fight and ignore and call me Natalie to irritate the rest of the time, but in the book nook she was mine.

During her forced time at home our story-sharing fell into a comfortable routine. I called it story-sharing that week because her questions after each chapter proved how much she’d listened, taken in, enjoyed; this participation meant she contributed to my putting paragraphs together and inspired future prose.

We split the ocean days in three; one day on the raft we made last through breakfast, tea and supper. Then at lunchtime we let Colin’s diary pages fall open and took turns reading aloud. His words rose and fell in the sunlit book nook corner. His thoughts of those difficult days were a mix of comical memories and sad observations and confused conclusions.

On Tuesday, from a page marked sixteen in faint pencil, Rose read aloud, slowly and carefully.

There were some funny moments – not too many, it has to be said, but a few scattered through the darker times. It must be hard for anyone to imagine it, but we found humour in silly inconsequential things, like when we’d all taken our shoes off to dry them a bit and then didn’t know which ones belonged to whom. We were all trying them on and remarking over the good feel of the better ones, as though we had just been paid and were in a shoe shop on Anlaby Road. One of the lads said he wasn’t even sure if his own feet were actually his. It doesn’t sound that funny now. Sounds silly. But we laughed. It might have been the last time we did
.

Rose giggled too, a melody of undulating notes. How I’d missed the sound.

I smiled, said, ‘Even when things are hard people can always laugh. It does actually make you feel better, you know.’

‘Mrs Kemp never thinks so when we laugh in
her
lessons,’ said Rose.

‘That’s not a time for silliness,’ I chided.

‘It is when Jade’s drawn something rude on the desk,’ said Rose.

I wanted our giggly sharing to last but too soon Rose wandered back to her bedroom until our next story chapter.

At teatime I told her about day three on the lifeboat, describing their discussion of how to eat the very hard ship-issue biscuits without breaking their teeth. Parched throats meant they could barely swallow the hateful things. Leak, who had of course lost his dentures, sobbed as he tried to eat one. They smashed one with a boot heel, then wrapped another in cloth and banged it against the boat edge.

‘Who invented such a nasty biscuit?’ asked Rose.

In the end Stewart the cabin boy suggested they soak it in a very small amount of seawater. It worked. But Colin longed for something moist to eat. He watched with the others as Ken continued to jab his spear at the water, some mocking cruelly when he failed to catch anything. Colin felt despair at Ken’s failure, wanted to shake his friend by the now thin scruff of his neck and scream his misery at him. But he didn’t.

After the chapter Rose asked, ‘I can’t remember exactly who’s who. Good stories shouldn’t just chuck totally loads of characters at you all at once.’

‘I had to cos they all arrived that way,’ I said.

Then we talked about the crew, trying to imagine exactly what each of them looked like.

‘It’s easy to recall the unusual ones,’ I said.

‘Like John Arnold cos he does all that bible stuff,’ she said. ‘I see him as kind of skinny and with a squeaky voice.’

I nodded. ‘I remember the injured ones most. Like Davies with his broken ribs and the Second with bad feet. I can’t imagine their pain.’

‘But that Second is boring,’ snapped Rose. ‘I like Weekes cos he’s a joker. He’d be real good fun. I’d want him on my boat.’ She paused. ‘Grandad Colin is the best though,’ she said, softly.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But they were all special to someone, remember.’

‘They’re not all going to get home are they?’

‘We’ll find out,’ I said.

‘They’re not. I know it.’ Rose switched off then. Like Marilyn Monroe assuming her famous persona, Rose stripped off her bright, interested coat and revealed the familiar alien beneath. She disappeared to her bedroom and I sat for a while in the book nook, clinging to the remnants of our words.

It felt at times like the ocean was more real than my everyday life. I remembered the way I’d written stories as a child, how I’d always picked words that matched (as I’d called it) so that when they were all in a row I could quite literally see them bounce. Now they didn’t just bounce, they jumped into life.

On Wednesday, from page twenty-five of Colin’s diary, I read another segment.

I miss the colours. Now I’ve been home a few weeks I can’t picture them anymore. There are no colours like that here. I don’t miss much else. I don’t talk about it to anyone. It hurts. My throat closes up like it did on the boat. I just write it here. There are no colours like those at sea. I can write colour names like cobalt and teal and cerulean and turquoise but none of those terms do any justice to what I saw
.

‘I saw colours like that when I fell down,’ said Rose.

‘When you fell down where?’ I asked, concerned.

‘In the kitchen, silly. When we went to the hospital. When I was feeling like all weird, I saw these crazy colours. They weren’t blue though, more reds and orange.’

‘That’s because you weren’t well,’ I said, sadly.

‘Like Grandad Colin.’

‘Yes, like him I suppose.’

She opened the diary again, at the front. ‘What do you think these buttons mean?’ she asked me, stroking them. ‘Why did Colin stick them in here?’

‘Who knows,’ I said.

‘Which do you like best? I like the gold cos it’s so pretty.’

I put my hand over hers, expecting to be pushed away. But for a moment she kept it there. ‘I like the brown one,’ I said.

‘Why? It’s totally boring.’

‘Maybe that’s why,’ I said. ‘It looks so small and insignificant. But what if it’s a big part of the story?’

On Thursday, due to her first low blood sugar reading – three-point-nine – Rose ate some fried chicken before her teatime injection instead of after it. It wasn’t dangerously low and she’d had no hypo symptoms but I knew she must eat first. I fussed a little, reread my manual, but Rose wrinkled her nose at me and said it was fine; she was just hungrier than usual.

So I told her about day four on the lifeboat.

One of the hardest things as time went on, aside from the increasing thirst and hunger, was the boredom. The abundance of time and nothing to do except look for a ship and think was torture. And thinking was no good because home occupied so much of Colin’s mind. He dreamt of his mother’s living room at night, and while lolling about on the deck in the daytime. He could almost put out a hand and run it along the walnut cabinet, sniff the air, smell his mother’s stew simmering, see dust dancing by the net curtain and a glimpse of the garden beyond.

In the afternoon Ken tried again to catch a fish and after ten minutes of effort realised with joy that he’d plunged his weapon into the side of a wriggling blue creature. The crew whooped with delight as he raised it from the water. Hungry hands reached out to pull it in and the fish – perhaps sensing it was his last chance – writhed ferociously, freed itself from the spike and swam away.

This time no one mocked Ken. No one had any words, any heart. Colin returned to his spot under the canvas. He didn’t speak for the rest of the day. None of them did. Even John Arnold’s now daily prayer was said with little hope or enthusiasm and night fell on a desolate crew.

‘Poor Grandad,’ said Rose afterwards.

‘I know,’ I said, emotion high in my throat.

She pushed a last piece of chicken around her plate. ‘I feel bad that I can eat this.’

‘You need to,’ I said.

‘Wish I could somehow take it to him on the boat.’

‘You’d have to travel seventy years backwards,’ I said. I found it profound that while Colin had dreamed of home, we told stories about the sea and escaped there.

‘I bet
I
could do that,’ Rose said softly.

Our week at home continued. Shelley did what she had promised during our phone conversation; she went into school and sat with Mrs White for an hour and explained how Rose’s unstable blood sugars could result in changes in behaviour, in severe and sudden hunger, and in mood swings.

‘I tried to make it clear,’ Shelley told me, ‘that this didn’t mean they should overlook bad behaviour because obviously there may be times when Rose has genuinely done something she shouldn’t …’

‘Of course,’ I interrupted, knowing my daughter well.

‘But if, say, during a hypo she did things she normally wouldn’t, they should look on it with a bit of compassion. I explained more specifically all the signs of hypo so they know to encourage her to drink some Lucozade.’

‘I did explain all this when Rose went back to school after the diagnosis,’ I said, exhausted by it.

‘Look, pet,’ said Shelley. ‘We may have to explain it a few times more. And then she’ll go to high school and you’ll have to do it all again. It’s a complex condition and there’s lots of misinformation out there. But you’re doing everything right. You really are.’

‘Doesn’t always feel like I am,’ I said. I was glad Colin’s diary entry had made me reach out to Shelley, but I still found it difficult to thank her, to admit I had needed help.

‘Remember you can ring me anytime,’ said Shelley.

Mrs White called me on Wednesday and said that if Rose really wanted to return to school the next day, she could. But I suggested perhaps we would take this time to master Rose’s condition even further and the headmistress agreed that it might be helpful to all of us. She never apologised but I didn’t mind. That she had called was enough, and I never found apologies easy either.

But I’d lied a little when I said I’d kept Rose home to master the diabetes. Yes, I supposed that was the reason, but really I wanted her with me. Even in her difficult mood, with a foreign-to-me-at-times personality, her presence stopped me feeling so utterly alone.

It was almost two weeks since I’d spoken to Jake. When he’d been gone this long I often found it hard to picture him, perhaps the way Colin had forgotten the sea’s colours. I’d think of specific moments during our relationship to recapture him. But his face was always hazy, like when photographers blur faces of interviewees to keep their identities secret.

I remembered the first time I knew Jake and I were really going to be together. I closed my eyes and saw the memory clearly.

We’d only known each other a few weeks. He lived with his grandfather then and I lived alone, twenty miles separating us. Funnily enough, it was December, like now. Snow had fallen heavily, blanketing everything in fresh white, and we were looking forward to Christmas.

Jake had always stayed at my place on a Wednesday and Saturday. But this was a Friday. I’d finished work, eaten tea, had a bath and decided to go to bed early. As I turned out the lights, there came a soft knock on the back door. Nervously I’d opened it with the safety chain attached. There stood Jake, covered in snow, his thick coat disguised by the flakes and his red hair so wet it looked black. His bike stood by the shed.

‘What…’ I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. I found a question. ‘Did we plan something tonight and I’ve forgotten?’

‘No,’ he said, smiling.

‘What is it? Is everything okay?’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Honest.’

‘Do you want to come in?’

He shook his head, sending snowflakes scattering like white confetti. ‘No, I can’t stop. I was in the bath. Hopefully it’ll still be warm.’

‘In the bath?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘So you got out and came here?’

‘I had to tell you something.’ Now Jake looked serious.

‘I’m worried,’ I admitted, wrapping my dressing gown more tightly about my body. I’d had a hard time starting a relationship with Jake. Hurt previously by a man who’d ended things by simply leaving, with no word, letter or phone call, I’d built a protective barrier around myself. So I began to think Jake had come to break it off, that I’d done something to cause it. Perhaps it was my coolness or my stubborn nature. I supposed that at least he had come to tell me and not decided to slink off into the night and disappear without trace.

I prepared to fight. I planned my response; that I didn’t care (I did) and I didn’t want him anyway (I did) and I’d cope on my own again (I would but with a heavier heart this time).

‘It’s nothing bad,’ Jake said, tenderly touching my arm. ‘No, I just … well, I was in the bath, like I said. Just lying there and thinking. And I realised something. I mean it came to me so clearly and I was so excited that I had to come and tell you.’

‘What?’ I still thought he was going to end it.

‘That I love you,’ said Jake.

‘Oh.’ It was all that came out. My fears fell away like melting snow.

‘That’s all.’ He retrieved his bike and climbed on.

‘That’s all?’ I repeated dumbly.

‘Yes.’ He grinned. ‘I just had to tell you. So you knew. I hope you don’t mind? And I don’t want you to say anything back to me. I didn’t tell you for that, I just thought … well, you should know. I’m really happy.’