Zeke
Zeke
We’re inside the boat now, me on the sofa, her on one of those new chairs—it’s just too hot out on the deck. I lean over to top up Lexi’s cup of milk. We decided to drink that first, though really we should probably have chucked it already—it’s been in a warm fridge all night. Food hygiene’s drilled into me, but there’s no five-star rating to hit here, and throwing food away feels so stupid. All the options feel stupid. I feel stupid.
I can’t believe I made her feel afraid.
“Thanks,” Lexi says, without looking at me.
I fidget, pulling one foot up underneath me, trying to get comfortable on the thin cushions of the crappy wooden “sofa.” I’m already feeling cooped up. I remember this sensation too well. Dad, Lyra and Jeremy would sit on this sofa hunched over their wooden puzzles for hours, and I’d be fizzing up like a bottle of Coke when you shake it—like I was going to explode. There’s plenty of puzzles to do , Dad would say. I hated those puzzles. I tried to sit down and figure them out, but it’d take less than a minute before I’d feel my fingers flexing with the urge to chuck the little wooden cubes against the wall.
I miss my mum. I should probably be thinking of my dad right now—that’s why I bought this boat, isn’t it?—but when it comes to crisis situations, it’s always Mum I want. Call my dad for advice and he’d give you a weird hack he saw on Reddit, or something some bloke told him in a pub garden in 1998. My mum can be overbearing, and my relationship with her is all kinds of complicated, but right now I’d kill to hear her pick up the phone with a brisk How are you, Ezekiel? What do you need?
“I think I’ll just…get back to making the inventory,” Lexi says, standing up to take her plate to the kitchen.
Things are feeling awkward. No surprise, probably, since in the last twelve hours she’s accused me of boat theft and held me at knifepoint. Meanwhile I’ve barbecued, been emotionally illiterate, and poked at some boat mechanics I’m totally unqualified to understand. I grit my teeth, so pissed off with myself. I know I’m no saint, but I am not that sort of man.
“I’ll get back to watching for boats,” I say, since that’s actually useful.
“Right.” She doesn’t even turn around.
As I stand up, I’m suddenly hit with the weirdest feeling that none of this is real. As if I’m standing in the middle of a set. As if someone is going to remove a panel of sky and I’ll find it’s just plywood.
I stop and stare at it all. The mini oil paintings of animals and seasides in their tatty frames. The chairs opposite me, fixed to the spots where Dad used to keep three mini beanbags, one for each of us kids. The paisley-patterned standing lamp that was definitely Dad’s, but that I can’t imagine him ever going out and buying, because I can’t really imagine my dad doing anything that normal. And the dark wood everywhere—the walls, the floor.
“You OK?” Lexi asks. She’s turned around now, leaning back against the kitchen countertop, watching me.
“Yeah. Just feeling sort of…”
I can’t find a way to say it. I chew at my cheek, embarrassed—I’m often slow to find the right words. But Lexi doesn’t act like it’s strange that I’ve run the sentence out before it’s done. She just waits.
“I, uh, I felt for a second like everything wasn’t really here.”
Lexi nods, and for a moment her eyes soften. “That’ll be the shock,” she says.
“Right. I guess I’ll…adjust.”
Her eyes sharpen again. “You won’t need to adjust,” she says, turning her back to me again. “Because any minute now, we’re getting off this boat.”
Six hours later, and we’re still here.
It’s getting…I don’t know. Both more and less surreal. We’ve ended up having to do normal stuff, like making dinner—three-cheese pasta, on the tiny gas hob—and saying excuse me as we squeeze past each other in the narrow gap between the kitchen and the bathroom. But with every minute that passes, it becomes more obvious that we’re in a properly horrifying situation.
I’ve not spent a lot of time imagining how I’d do in a survival-type scenario, but I’d have backed myself to be one of the ones building a life-float out of tree branches or swimming out to search the fallen plane. No planes or trees here, though. We’ve got flea-market wall art, dead batteries and Tesco Value salad. I kind of wish this was a desert island—I wish I was writing HELP in the sand and collecting wood for a signal fire. Instead, I’m wondering how long Red Leicester takes to go bad, already itchy with cabin fever.
“So,” Lexi says, clearing her throat as I pass her a bowl of pasta on the deck. “We should probably…talk.”
“Sure,” I say, pulling out both of the deck chairs with my free hand. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Well, I hardly know you. And right now you’re the only person who can help if I fall into the sea and a bunch of sharks try to eat me. So we should probably build on the trust.”
Her eyes tighten slightly as she says this—embarrassment, maybe, about the whole thing with the knives. I don’t want her to feel embarrassed. I’m the one that’s been a total idiot.
“Tell me about why you bought this houseboat,” she says.
I appreciate the gesture. It’s the first time she’s actually said she believes it belongs to me, not Penny. It’s an olive branch, maybe.
“It was my dad’s, like I said at the pub,” I say, sitting down beside her. “We have some unfinished business.”
The deck chairs just about fit side by side. The sun’s off to our right, low in the sky. It makes me think of a lemon fruit pastille: it has a kind of sugarcoated haze to it. I look away from the empty horizon.
“Didn’t you say your dad’s dead?” Lexi says, wincing as the deck chair sags beneath her.
I nod. “Heart attack, five and a half years ago.”
“OK, so, is this houseboat haunted by his unsatisfied ghost or something?” she asks, without particular alarm.
I laugh. It’s the sort of thing Dad would’ve joked about doing—haunting us all after he’s gone. Lexi looks surprised for a moment, and then smooths her face clear.
“Most people tiptoe around dead people,” I say, trying a forkful of the pasta. It’s good: just the right amount of nuttiness from the Red Leicester, smooth texture from the milk. Wish we’d had cream, though. “You’re very chill. Talking about it.”
“I’m not very sentimental.” She points at her chest with her fork. “Hard bastard, I’m afraid.”
Hmm. She’s definitely tough, but I wouldn’t say hard .
“I didn’t even cry when my mum died,” she says. Kind of defensive, like she’s annoyed I didn’t believe her.
“I’m sorry you lost your mum,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s been four years, so I think I’m supposed to say I’m over it, but I’m not sure I am, actually. Is it the shock, or is this really bloody delicious?” She stares down at the pasta as if she’s just noticed it, even though she’s four forkfuls in.
I smile. “You can’t go wrong with that much cheese.”
This actually isn’t true. I’m kind of proud that this dinner isn’t just a big sticky beige lump.
“And you don’t have to be over it,” I say. “My dad died in 2018, and, like…”
I try to find the words for the total mess that’s been my grieving process over the last five years. How it started with no tears, barely missing him at all. How it hid behind drunken nights out and awkward morning afters. How starting therapy last year made me see that I’d packed all the feelings away without looking, and that’s a shit way to cope with anything. There’s been a lot of crying since.
“This stuff’s complicated,” I say. “There’s no right way to do it.”
She lifts one eyebrow—doesn’t have much patience for this kind of thinking, maybe—and takes another forkful.
“You and your dad, were you close, then?” she asks eventually.
I tilt my head, trying to catch her eye, but she’s focused on her bowl. This is so weird. The world’s strangest second date. The world’s longest morning after. I know she wasn’t interested in getting to know me yesterday, or this morning—she wanted fun, and then she wanted me gone. So now what?
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she says, when I don’t answer right away. “I was just making conversation.”
“No, no,” I say. “It’s good, I want to talk. It’s just a complicated question.”
She shrugs, lifting her chin toward the open water. “We’ve got a bit of time.”
I smile at that, but it makes me shiver, too.
“OK, well, Dad was…a character. That’s what people used to always say about him. He was separated from my mum, so me and my brother and sister only visited him once a month. He had this big scruffy beard, believed in aliens. He was totally obsessed with puzzles, and he was always reciting lines from Bob Dylan songs, you know, like someone might wheel out a Bible quote for every situation?”
Lexi’s lip twitches. “I think I might have quite liked him.”
I’m glad she says that. People either got my dad or they didn’t—I never met anyone who thought he was just all right . As kids, Jeremy and I were in the hero-worship camp—always willing to forgive his oddities while Lyra turned moody teenager and began to scorn them. But then Dad’s weirdness started to seem less cool to me, too. I got a hint that he held things back, maybe. I realized he kept secrets, and I got to thinking about what those secrets might be.
When he died, I was seventeen, and we’d not spoken in three years. Our estrangement wasn’t dramatic: just a slow, awkward drift. My therapist has suggested that it was more than simply a case of rejecting my dad before he could reject me—he thinks I distanced myself from Dad to ingratiate myself to my mum. As much as I hate the thought, I do kind of wonder. Mum’s hard to win over. I’ve tried worse things to get her approval, or her disapproval, come to that—either would do.
Dad leaving me the houseboat felt like a message I completely failed to understand—typical of our relationship, really. I sold it as quickly as I could, just wanting it gone. Wanting him gone. And now here I am, spending most of the money my granddad left me to get the houseboat back.
“You said last night you weren’t going to be in this part of the country for long. Is this where your family are from?” she asks.
“This?”
“Yes, this barren expanse of ocean—are your family not sea-dwelling mermaids?”
I laugh. Her lips press together for a second, as though she’s irritated, but I reckon actually she’s pleased. I’m starting to think that reading Lexi is kind of like reading something in code. All the gestures the rest of us use mean something different for her. So far, I’ve figured out that when she does lift the corners of her mouth, it’s not a smile, it’s more like an eyebrow-raise. When she frowns, she’s not angry—she’s thinking. And when she avoids my eyes, I reckon it’s not because she doesn’t want to look at me. It’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s in hers.
“I meant Northumberland.”
“Yeah. My brother and sister—Jeremy and Lyra—and my mum, all my cousins and aunts and uncles…they stuck around the Alnwick area. They’re all within half an hour of one another.”
“And you’re down in…”
“London,” I say, just as she says the same word. “How did you guess?”
“You look like you’re about two inches away from a man bun.”
That makes me properly belly-laugh. I reach for my hair, tugging experimentally at the ends of my curls.
“Yeah, you’re not wrong. And you? Did you grow up in Gilmouth?”
She nods, setting her bowl down under the deck chair and lying back. “How did you guess?” She gestures toward herself. “Small-town vibes?”
“No,” I say, after a moment. “You just seemed at home. When we met.”
She blinks quickly. I don’t know what that means yet.
“Well, yeah. That pub where we met, it was mine, once.”
“You owned the pub?”
“I inherited it from my mum. I got the pub, Penny got the houseboat.”
“Wait, is Penny your sister?” I say, frowning. She said friend before.
“No,” Lexi says, in a tone that makes me think she’s had to answer that one a lot. “She lived behind the pub garden. But her homelife wasn’t great. When I was…maybe seven, and she was about five, she started hanging out with us at the pub—she used to climb over the back fence. We were best friends. My mum raised her, really. When Mum died, Mae—Penny’s daughter—hadn’t even been born yet. The dad was a prick who didn’t want anything to do with her, so…” She shrugs, moving to stand. “That’s how I ended up owning the pub. Not what I’d planned, but with Penny and Mae to support…Anyway. It’s complicated.”
“You helped support your best friend and her kid? That’s pretty huge.”
Her face goes tight. She turns away from me. I get the sense I’ve touched on something important, something that’ll help make sense of Lexi, but even before she speaks, I can tell she’s going to shut me out again. It was like this last night: I’d catch little flashes of a Lexi she keeps hidden, then she’d go back under.
“I’ve not finished checking the boat over for any damage,” she says. “Here. I’ll wash up.”
I feel her pause behind me as she opens the door.
“ Do we wash up?” she asks.
“Hey?” I say, turning around.
“Well, if we’re trying to save water…”
I swallow. For the first time all day, I’ve not been thinking about being lost at sea.
“I’ll just leave it in the sink,” she says. “Someone’ll be along to rescue us in a minute anyway.”
We’ve said that to each other a lot today. I reckon a solid fifty percent of conversations have been along the lines of, Don’t worry, we’ll be rescued . We’ve tossed it back and forth like a ball. Her turn, then mine.
She heads inside. I listen to the clatter in the kitchen and close my eyes. The one thing we’ve not said to each other is, We might not be rescued at all . But that sentence has been going round and round in my head since the moment I stepped out onto this deck this morning, and I’d be willing to bet Lexi’s feeling exactly the same.
The sunset’s epic, a vivid satsuma-orange. There’s just nothing in the way of it out here—it’s all sky. The sea turns bright as the sun sinks, shining like it’s candlelit.
Then…it gets dark.
“Well, it’ll be easier to spot other boats,” Lexi offers, pulling a hoody on and then tugging her leather jacket back over the top.
We’re standing on the deck, looking out at where the sun went, as if maybe we can wish it back. The air smells cool and sharp. I shiver. It feels more like a wilderness out here when it’s dark. Empty, but in a threatening way. Not in a nice, nothing-coming-to-get-you way.
“Though we don’t have any lights, so it won’t be so easy for them to spot us ,” Lexi continues. She says it briskly, as though she’s just being practical, but I notice her shoulders drooping a bit. “We should do shifts. One of us keeps watch.”
“Mm. That’s a good idea. Do you want first or second shift?” I ask.
“You choose.”
“I don’t mind—you pick.”
I hear her huff of frustration, and wince. It probably makes me seem young, being so indecisive. I’m just kind of used to someone else wanting to make decisions.
“Fine, I’ll go to bed now, we can swap over at two,” she says.
“Great.”
She doesn’t go. She turns her face up to the moon, breathing deeply.
“This is all so fucking mental,” she says quietly. “And I know when you come in to get me there’s going to be that moment you always get when you wake up somewhere new, you know? Where you haven’t quite realized what’s going on, where your brain and your body assume you’re still where you’d usually be. And then there’ll be the moment after that. When I remember.”
“And you’re scared of that?”
The low, wet schlup of the sea against the boat beneath us is so much louder now that it’s dark.
“I’m not scared,” she says.
I’m not sure whether to call bullshit on this. If she needs to tell me she’s not scared, maybe I should let her.
“How about if I make it quick?” I ask eventually. “If I wake you up like, ‘Good morning, it’s two a.m. and you’re stuck on a houseboat in the middle of the ocean with your one-night stand’? Just get it all out there?”
She snorts. “How kind.”
“Or do you want that second where you forget about it all?”
She’s quiet. “No,” she says. “I’d always rather know the truth.”
“Same.”
“Then I’ll bear that in mind when it’s my turn to wake you.” She shifts away from me, opening the door. “Good night, Zeke.”
“Night.”
Maybe I’m being ridiculous, but…I feel like I know the exact moment she falls asleep. It’s just a different sort of quiet. The stars are properly out now, and they’re crazy—they’re not dotted around the blackness, they’re covering every centimeter of sky. I convince myself I can see the Milky Way, but I’ve no idea whether I’m even looking the right way.
I have a bit of a cry around midnight. Thinking about my dad. Looking up at the sky and wondering if that’s where he’s gone, up into the universe, singing out Bob Dylan among the stars. I wonder if Jeremy’s right—if all the answers I’m looking for are hidden on this houseboat somewhere. Up until now, I’ve been a bit too busy to go looking, but Lexi’s right. We’ve got nothing but time.