Spitting at the Stars
When I was young, my father, an amateur sailor at best, bought a boat, afraid the world was going to end. His little Noah complex, my mother called it. But of course there was a flood and he was right. I don’t remember how they heard, the radio perhaps, but I do remember being moored up one day and the next, my mother and father bundling me and my sister aboard Quentin’s Ark and driving us along the estuary and out into open water.
We’d barely been at sea a day when the first changes appeared. Ice where it shouldn’t have been, strange, changing currents and so on. In the early hours of the second morning, Fredericka and I woke to a tumbling scene, cards, books, toys, all rotating as if in a great machine. We were struck several times. I crawled up onto the bridge and reeled in the hatchway as swells broke over the yacht. Mum and dad were struggling with the sails. I found out later that the engine had failed due to the boat tangling with a nest of broken telegraph wires; we were in shallow waters and the wires had disabled the propeller and rudder. I was only seven at the time and a violent wind plucked at me as if testing my weight; my sister was even younger and stood behind me, clutching at my pyjama bottoms. Though I’m much older now, if I really focus I can still feel the pull of the cloth against my thigh.
The reason my father had decided to use the sails was not just because of the threat of wind and wave; the boat was being driven towards rocks, which opened and closed like black teeth off the starboard side. All told, I can only imagine my mother’s distress when she saw us perched in the hatchway and I still remember her screaming at me, “Prentice! Get below!” but when my sister’s old phone was washed to the starboard edge, she pushed between my legs and went after it. Mum and dad were hoisting sail and hadn’t seen their daughter’s rash plunge, which left me to deal with it on my own. A wave almost broadsided us and Fredericka hit the railing, one arm driven between the cable, her hand just managing to secure the phone before it was washed overboard.
I remember thinking she’d be fine, even after she hit the rail I knew I could save her. I crouched against the wind, spread my hands, pushed myself out into the blast. I focused on her foot, stretched for it, felt the boat drop into a gulf, tip sideways. There was a massive battening of water, electric in its coldness and then she was gone.
My mother used to say everyone carries a bag around full of memories; the older you get, the heavier the bag. She once explained, that’s why old people walk around all stooped over but I didn’t need to get old to feel that bag; my sister was my responsibility and I didn’t save her. That one memory weighed enough to bend me double whenever I dwelled on it.
After we escaped the black rocks, we circled the area many times looking for Fredericka but to no avail. The world was all but gone and those few still alive and in possession of land, clung jealously to it. So we remained at sea; perhaps, in retrospect, my parents made no real effort to regain a little soil because we’d lost my sister in the brine, I don’t know. We lived on the boat for years, dad and mum skippering, organising supplies, cooking, mending, both of them teaching me what they knew. They had saved many books and reading became my only solace, for though this routine afforded my parents a little happiness, I was miserable––it’s lonely being the only child in the world––the sea is beautiful but anything endless loses its beauty, finally, a truth that perhaps explains why folks were once so blithe with the world. The few times we spotted land I wasn’t allowed ashore, it was too dangerous, my parents said. And of course, I missed my sister.
But those times were to seem like memories of Paradise compared to what followed. Not long after my tenth birthday, in the cold and early hours of a November morning, we were boarded. The first I knew of it, I was woken by the smacking of waves. Waves have many sounds, all of which I know by heart, they slap and gurgle and rush but this was different: it was the sound created by waves trapped between two hulls. We’d never moored with another boat; in fact, in three years, I’d only ever seen a handful of other vessels, all of which my parents were very keen to get away from, our boat being built for speed, not defence.
But the others came when we were asleep. There was no getting away. The new sound, of waves being trapped, intensified. The boats struck, shivered, a voice barked orders, our boat rocked several times and I heard footsteps.
The three of us were bound and dragged up onto the main deck. It was very cold; there seemed more stars than sky. My mother and I were picked up and thrown from one boat to the other like sacks of fish and locked in a cabin that stank so strongly of sweat and urine my mother grew faint. I held my breath and tried to see what they were doing to my father. There was a small porthole facing our boat and through it I could the lower parts of several men, all surrounding my father’s kneeling form. Most of the time, I could only see his knees, though occasionally, the waves threw the boat higher and I could see his bent head, his hair covering his face. But though my line of sight was limited I could hear well enough. My father was begging for our lives.
In that moment I felt again the terrible grief I had experienced when my sister was washed overboard. Again I felt powerless and guilty for not having garnered strength, for not being ready; I was only ten but for a moment I felt like a man, as perhaps all boys do when presented with situations over which they have no mastery. Later in my life I recognised the pure pill of love buried in that bright flame. My father’s final minutes were grains between my fingers. I heard a thud and he slumped forwards and a moment later I heard a splash. We never saw him again.
Over the next few days my mother was abused; I did not see this, only the last time when the captain slit a man’s throat from behind, covering her in blood. I too had been pressed from above, sweated upon, probed with rough fingers and my mind had gone to some distant place, like a star, dim and untouchable. Even as the captain opened the man’s neck, I was curled in a corner watching through half-open eyes, my mind recalling the time my father once gutted a tuna.
Afterwards, the captain took us under his wing, we lived in his cabin and he was the only man allowed to touch my mother. I can’t say they were happy times but they were better for knowing that we were relatively safe. My mother taught me to cook and we prepared the food. All my memories are filled with the wet, meaty scents of fish: wolf eel, flounder, mullet, plaice, sardine, you name it, we caught it, cooked it, ate it, traded in it. Mainly we traded with other ships, some of which the captain would leave to go on their way, those that were sufficiently armed; others he boarded, butchered and robbed. Three times over the next few years we changed boats; bigger boats, better cabins, more armoury until, for almost a year before we found The Destino, there was no other boat we came across that made it worth moving. They were red months, all.
I never forgot my sister though, or that silly old telephone with its battered buttons and dead battery, but instead of her smile it was always her face at the railing I saw, her wild eyes and wet hair. When I remembered my father, I recalled better times, his smile as he backed Quentin’s Ark (dad’s silly name, mum’s silly idea) into our old yard, my mother’s open mouth as he jumped down. Still though, such memories always turned down darker paths and I learned to keep my eyes forwards. In the meantime, I determined to become stronger, to be ready when my mother needed me; I would not be found lacking again and by the time I turned fourteen, I could hoist sail as fast as any on board, rig floats and weights, cast, guide and mend nets, sort and clean any catch from sprat to sperm and make the only stew could be stomached two nights in a row.
I was at the crest of the same wave where boys are made to feel men before their time, unaware of the line between the boy I’d once been, clinging to a porthole and listening to thieves murder his father and my older ‘wiser’ self. It was only afterwards that I learnt how each green valley naturally climbs to snowy heights and that each crest must descend, each and every wave part of the same line. Captain Redmond, who hardly spoke to me, explained this idea once in a rare burst of verbal largesse. I’d just cut open a hagfish, an eel-like creature that devours its meals with circular jaws, only to find it full of eggs. I shivered and was reminded of a spider I’d once killed. Fishermen hate hagfish due to their habit of preying on netted fish but hagfish taste good and their eggs are quite a delicacy, so I was pleased. When Redmond saw the eggs, he clapped me on the shoulder. “Fin and fang,” he said. “Feed today for tomorrow you are food.” It was the first I’d heard such an idea and whenever I recall it, I picture the two objects cupped together like this:
It was the kind of romantic notion that appealed to the young man I was becoming. All that work had made me fit and strong and it was a feeling I relished: rising up the wave of my own grace, feeling my body grow each time it ached and ache each time it grew; needless to say, whenever I thought about death, it was never my own and, if in my imagination it was I who caused someone else to die, it was always right and just. Sometimes up in the crow’s nest I even imagined reaching up and prising free the stars like jewels from a crown. Indeed, such were my thoughts the night before we spied The Destino: a flat sea reflected a sparkling black sky so that the boat seemed to float in space, a dark hole against an armful of glitter. I recall feeling like a dragon guarding its gold, powerful and complete, untouchable, but I was wrong. I since discovered that between the great walls of life and death, there is nothing that we call power that is of value.
And then the next evening The Destino appeared, riding the horizon like a dark bead against the setting sun. When Redmond ordered us alongside, I remember running to the bowsprit, hands on the jibstay, my chest reaching, my heart atumble. The other boat’s sails were slack, the sound they made, like fists punching wet sand. I was first aboard, eager to discover foodstuffs unrelated to fish, for nothing pleased the captain more than the taste of something grown in soil. After finding the galley, I prised the lock on the pantry, wherein lay a dozen strips of goat jerky, five sacks of flour, a jar of rat poison, a rough kind of toilet paper and a large bag of dried apples.
Next to the galley was a locked cabin and I was quick to force the wood, hoping to find more treasures, but as it gave, I stopped, perched on the edge of the fluttering light cast by my lamp, gawping at the body upon the bunk opposite the door. It belonged to a girl. Despite the thump of my shoulder and the screech of wood, she was asleep and I stared at the dark hair dividing her face, hoping to divine the pale land between. Her face and neck fluttered with porcelain veins and there was in that intricate run a loveliness I had never seen before. As the men thumped back and forth above, her eyes opened and when they found me, they filled with fear, just as mine did with doubt. Oh, the wonder and the terror! It was Fredericka, my sister returned. She was long and thin, too thin, but this seeming weakness vanished as she recognised me also, her dark eyes opening a vent to some fire in her heart. She reached under her mattress and held something up in the light. “I called you,” she said.
Just then, one of the lads appeared behind me, a rough youth by the name of Leer and there was no need to turn to know the look in his eye. “Looks like we’re having more than fish tonight,” he said but even as the words whispered past my ear, I jabbed my elbow back into his sternum. He doubled up and I seized his head and smacked his face into the doorjamb. The blow splintered his nose, pushed it like a fork into his brain. As he landed at my feet, fear and relief made me weak at the knees and I could see that Fredericka was trembling. However, when we looked at each other, we knew without exchanging a single word that we were together, come hill or high water.
We carried the dead man down the corridor towards the hatch that led into the hull. After opening it, we pushed Leer over the edge. It must have been a fifteen-foot drop. We left the hatch open and made our way aft. Ahead of us, I could see Captain Redmond coming down the steps into the galley; he was a crimson man, so full of bile he looked like he might burst at any moment, worse when he was angry. Between his lamp and mine it was too bright in the corridor and when he barked at me to step up, I was terrified. I’d smeared Fredericka’s face with oil and given her my top. The hood shadowed her eyes. I told the captain I’d found a lad in one of the cabins and he peered at her, his light swaying between them. He reached out, squeezed her chin, turned her face, touched her chest and then grunted dismissively. He enquired after Leer and I pointed aft, before asking if the new boy could help prepare dinner; I said he’d given me some apples and maybe we could have pie.
The captain’s eyes lit up and he told us to ‘get’, so we went, up to the deck and over the rail. Mother was in Redmond’s cabin and I wanted to take Fredericka to her but it was too much of a risk, so instead I lit a fire and Fredericka and I started to prepare supper. Next door, lamplight crept to and fro, occasionally bursting across the deck or from one of several portholes. Then there rose a great cry that made us clutch at each other. As the captain’s howl continued, we heard several bellows of distress as those around him tried to either subdue the man or unsuccessfully remove themselves from his path. Obviously Leer had been found––either by the captain––or the captain had been told, for Leer Redmond was his only son.
Fredericka and I busied ourselves, knowing dinner might be the only thing standing between us and death.
By the time the captain returned, he had a bottle in his fist and his eyes were as scarlet as his face. The galley was situated in the stern and the open hatch was filled with the aroma of beef stock and potatoes and the autumn ripeness of apples. As Redmond’s foot struck the top step, we turned and looked busy. We’d purposefully left jobs to do. The dark interior writhed with lamplight and the captain hissed: “You kids, you’re all the same. Stewpid.” Then he stopped and inhaled. “But at least these stewpid arses know how to cook,” a man said from behind him. I looked up just as the captain seized the speaker by the throat. “T’rupt me again, Kidder,” he said, “an’ I’ll have your tongue.” However, the moment of danger had passed and soon the crew and even the captain, grief-stricken as he was, were eating.
My mother was there also. She was a shade of the woman she had once been. She rarely responded now when I spoke to her and sometimes not even when I touched her. Even my growing independence seemed to make her shrink further into herself. When the day came for us to fight for our lives, I’d wanted to be ready but now that I was, I no longer knew her. I kept glancing at her to see if she recognised her daughter but she recognised nothing.
That night, as usual, she ate with the men, so they could look at her––one of the captain’s concessions––and though she ate less than them, she ate some. I wanted to stop her but it would have looked suspicious. So as my sister busied herself at the galley sink and I served the men around the table and indeed, my mother, the jewel in that tarnished knot, my eyes called out to her even as the silence of my mouth condemned her.
Redmond passed round a bottle of rum and as the men drank, their shouting and swearing grew worse until it became obvious that their excitability was due to more than just liquor. They were all sweating profusely, including my mother, who kept scratching at her skin and shrugging the captain’s hands away until finally he exploded. He went to strike her but as he did so, his body started shaking. By then it was dawn and the first rays passed through the portholes. Kidder tried to pin the captain down but when the sunlight struck his face, he also went into spasm, particularly his legs, which drummed under the table. Others vomited.
My mother looked at me across the table. Her dark eyes glittered. She knew what I’d done but she smiled anyway and my love for her flared white-hot so that I almost went to her but she raised a finger and I stopped. It was in that same moment that she recognised her daughter and it was as if she’d seen the face of God. With tears in her eyes, she nodded; it was the briefest of movements. Then she too threw up.
She was the last to die. Afterwards, Fredericka and I lay aboard The Destino in a kind of daze, neither speaking nor touching but comforted I think by each other’s presence. Only as evening approached did Fredericka open her mouth to ask, of all things, if I still remembered the spider.
When my father first showed us the boat, almost a year before the flood, he rolled back the heavy green canvas as if it were Christmas and we kids asked to explore, something our mother would never normally have permitted. However, as she began to say no, he silenced her with three little words: Just this once. Before she could change her mind we clambered up the ladder and began skirting the railing, mum following us on the ground, telling us to be careful and holding out her arms. We sat on the front deck, helped each other along the bowsprit, pulled ourselves up onto the roof of the bridge before dropping one after the other onto the back deck. Dad had climbed the ladder and was watching us. He stepped over on to the deck and told mum to come up and join us. She said she wanted to stay on the ground, just in case, but dad said we were about to explore the cabins, weren’t we? We nodded and I watched as mum appeared at the top of the ladder and I think we were about to have a good laugh but that was when Fredericka saw the spider. Due to the expense of insurance and also because dad didn’t want to skipper on his own, he’d towed the boat all the way from Barcelona rather than sail her. Before that she’d stood in dry dock for over a year and was in great need of a scrub and a coat of paint. Strange leaves were tattooed upon her roof and both decks were mapped with lichen. This was why no one saw the web until Fredericka walked into it. It lay to the left of the hatchway and was perhaps a foot in width. Behind it lay a cone-shaped tube. Fredericka had turned to look at what she was stuck to only to see the spider vibrating in the middle of the web. She screamed and pointed. Straightaway I could see that the spider was foreign: it had two black stripes on its back and a strange, whitish body. I looked closer and realised that it wasn’t actually moving of its own accord but that hundreds of tiny, almost translucent spiders, obviously recently born, were flowing upwards out of the cone and covering their mother as if with a blanket.
But here again I was wrong and it was my mother who corrected my assumption. “They’re eating her,” she said.
Perhaps it was her tone or the look on her face or the way the web stuck to Fredericka’s trousers but I found myself removing my shoe and driving it through the web and the silvery cone behind it. My father tried to stop me but by the time he’d seized my arm, I had struck the spider and her young several times, killing the mother and many of the babies. Tiny spiders scattered to corners and cracks. As I lay in that cabin all those years later, I saw everything, as if for the first time, through my sister’s eyes. Fear is a strange disease, virile in its capacity, difficult to stamp out, a kind of symbiotic fungus that sucks the very life out of us even as it claims to save us from harm.
The Destino rose and fell upon a steady sea. When I looked at my sister, she was watching me. She asked if I thought I’d done the right thing and again I did not answer. In truth, I did not know to which she referred, the spider or our mother but even if I had, I wouldn’t have known what to say.
At dusk we removed all of value from Redmond’s boat and carried our mother’s body up onto the weather deck. We pushed the rest of the bodies overboard. Though tied together, the boats were unanchored so that they drifted steadily eastward, signs of contest occasionally breaking the surface in their wake.
Fredericka scattered the rest of the apples over our mother’s body and I wrapped it in a sail, before going below and setting the boat alight. Finally we pushed my old home off into the dark, before sitting on The Destino’s bowsprit, our arms around each other. With faces turned to the burning boat, we watched as our mother shrank upon the night, her body sighing with flames and spitting at the stars.
Luke Bramley was raised on a yacht built by his father and moored all around the Cornish coast, after which he moved to the Midlands where he studied English Literature at Birmingham University. He has since lived in the States and New Zealand and is currently teaching English at Ecole Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel in Lille, France. He has written several short stories and poems and a novel entitled The Kingdom Within, which was shortlisted for the Yeovil Literary Prize. Luke is currently working on several writing projects including a second novel entitled The Soldrums.
