Zeke
Zeke
I’m hanging out with a beautiful woman, and we’re not going to have sex.
I don’t really know how I feel about this.
I saw the way she was looking at me when I walked into the bedroom earlier, and my heart kind of sank, like, oh yeah, that’s what she needs from me, isn’t it? I should’ve guessed it would be. She made it clear that was all she wanted from the start.
But then I remembered what she said yesterday, about being a woman trapped somewhere with a man she hardly knows. I remembered the way she doubled over laughing this morning on the deck as I messed around trying to grab Eugene, and how good it felt to hear that sound, to know that it was me that brought it out of her. I remembered that I’m actually good for more than one thing, and that maybe that’s not what she needs from me here, and maybe it can be me who sets that boundary this time.
And I’m kind of proud of myself.
For the last eight months, I’ve been working with a therapist. My flatmate, Brady, brought up the idea, and the suggestion was so out of character, I actually listened. I just wonder if you’re OK, mate , he’d said, fidgeting next to me as we watched an old How I Met Your Mother rerun at nine a.m. He was just up, and I’d not slept, going from the restaurant to a nightclub, bringing another woman home to my bed, seeing her down to her Uber that morning the way I always do. Like, it’s cool to want a lot of sex and stay out all night with women if that’s what you like, but…do you? Brady asked. Do you actually? Because you seem really fucking tired all the time, man. What’s it all for?
Turns out that was a very good question. The sex was a temporary fix, that’s what therapy’s taught me. It was a way to feel good about myself for a night without any of the risks associated with actually getting to know someone.
I don’t know when it became a habit, but it did. Wanting to give people what they need from me so they’ll like me better, and then wanting to leave when it’s still my decision to go.
I’ve been making progress, though. I made a conscious choice to take a different path—fall in love, have a healthy, happy family, all that stuff. I’m worth more than just one night.
That’s the mantra anyway.
I stand out on the deck, fingering the tarpaulin by the helm. I guess breaking my rules for Lexi meant I felt like I couldn’t be totally myself with her. And now that I’ve set that boundary, now that I know we’re not going to sleep together, I feel like a weight’s lifted, even though—and this is so messed up—even though actually I’d love to sleep with Lexi again. I mean, she’s so beautiful. And that night was…
“You’re always standing there,” she says, emerging suddenly through the door onto the deck.
She’s in shorts and a T-shirt now, hair piled in its usual giant bun. Stripped back and gorgeous. I bet she has no idea how attractive this look is.
“Does it make you feel in control, or something?” she says. “Captain of your own ship?”
I realize I’ve got one hand on the completely useless helm.
“Oh,” I say. “Umm.”
“Co-captain,” she corrects herself. “ Platonic co-captain.”
I wince slightly. “Did I go too hard on the platonic thing? Because…”
“What, you mean…”
She mimics the slashing gesture I made when I said, All sex acts strictly forbidden .
“I’ve not had a lot of practice at that conversation,” I say, smoothing my curls down.
Lexi’s mouth lifts in a quick smile. “You were very effective.”
“But I came across like a bit of a dickhead,” I finish for her.
She shrugs, moving past me to look out at the water. “We’re all dickheads sometimes,” she says, not unkindly.
I frown slightly. Her saying that, it snagged on something. Déjà vu again, maybe? Like I’ve heard someone use that line before.
“Seriously, though, I get it. Sorry if I was a bit prickly about it at first. Just, you know. A woman’s got pride.”
She’s got her back to me, hands on the railing.
“But everything you said was right.” She glances over her shoulder. “I think we’re doing pretty well, you know. Not dead yet. Not killed each other yet.” She looks at me in an evaluating sort of way, eyes narrowed a little. “You think you can survive out here for a while without me driving you nuts? If we have to?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, totally.”
I don’t even have to think about it. I like being around Lexi. She’s interesting, and she’s smart, and even when I’ve pissed her off, she doesn’t make me feel stupid.
“Same for you,” she says.
I smile, leaning against the helm. I guess this is…friendship, then? Is that what it is? It feels more comfortable than anything we’ve had so far.
“So,” she says briskly. I’m starting to get that Lexi isn’t really the dwell-in-a-nice-moment type. “Any idea what the hell we do now?”
“I did have…I did think…” I bite my bottom lip. I don’t know why I started either of those sentences. I was just thinking how nice it is that Lexi doesn’t think I’m dumb, and now I’m about to suggest something she’ll definitely think is stupid.
She turns, putting her back to the railing, arms folded across her T-shirt.
“Mm?” she prompts.
“This tarp,” I say, tilting my head to the tarpaulin I was fiddling with when I first came out onto the deck. “I was just thinking, like…could we…make a sail? Or is that ridiculous? Because I have no idea how to…”
“Zeke,” Lexi says, her eyes widening, “you’re a fucking genius.”
All right. So Lexi also has no idea how to make a sail. This should make me feel worse, but it makes me feel quite a lot better, actually.
“I’m confident it should be triangular,” she says, standing on the sofa.
She’s trying to get a bird’s-eye view of the tarpaulin we’ve just cut from the boat with my largest knife, which kind of made me want to cry, but: priorities. Still, it’ll be totally blunt now. A blunt knife is a tragedy. A smaller tragedy than me dying at sea, but still shit.
“We can attach it to Dad’s flagpole,” I say, “but I feel like we need another pole…along the bottom, maybe?”
“Right,” Lexi says, clicking her fingers and looking around her for an obliging pole. “Sorted,” she says, pointing to the standard lamp.
I eye it. It’s quite…small.
“Don’t look at my pole like that,” Lexi says, deadpan. “It’s about what you do with it.”
That makes me snort with laughter. I see the pleased glimmer in her eye before she turns her attention back to the tarpaulin.
“You know this isn’t going to be any use right now, don’t you, given there’s zero breeze?” I say. I’m worried the idea’s going to disappoint her.
She waves that off. “Yeah, but when there is a breeze, we’ll be ready. Is there anything useful in the bedroom? The wardrobe hanging rail?”
“It’s about thirty centimeters long,” I point out, “but I’ll check in case there’s something we’ve missed.”
She nods, not looking away from the tarpaulin. I head for the bedroom, glancing out of the kitchen window as I go. More sea, more sky, more nothing else.
I go to the wardrobe first, to take a look at the rail. But the first thing I spot when I open that door are the books.
The logbooks. Dad’s logbooks.
They’re scattered on the wardrobe floor, over my duffel bag and hers, as if Lexi just upended the box when she found them. And there’s a secret compartment left open in the back of the wardrobe—a cubbyhole. One of my dad’s classics. I recognize the mechanism.
My heart’s hammering. Dad always loved his hidden compartments. When we were kids, he built us our own secret drawers inside our IKEA desks. Mine was filled with marbles, then scrawled song lyrics, then the little scraps of evidence that my father wasn’t really my father.
“Zeke? You all right?” Lexi says from behind me. “Oh yeah, I totally forgot about those in all the Eugene excitement. I meant to read them as soon as we were done.”
I whirl to look at her. “They’re private, OK? You can’t read them.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “They’re yours?”
“No, they—they were my father’s.”
Dad filled those logbooks out religiously, the way he did most things. Meticulous and obsessive, that was my dad, and that’s Jeremy and Lyra through and through as well, though it looks different on those two. For Jeremy, it’s about getting everything just right: top marks in every exam, the perfect house, the perfect job. For Lyra, it’s more like she’s pissed off at the whole world for being so disorganized.
My dad’s logbooks were private—he’d stop writing the minute one of us came in. I used to look at their thick leather covers and wonder whether those books would tell me what my dad actually thought—about me, but also about my mum, our family, why the whole thing got so broken. Dad was an enigma, with his quotes and his riddles and his secrets. As a kid, even before I got suspicious about him being my real dad, I thought he didn’t really want me. He was always stilted around me, different from how he was with Lyra and Jeremy.
I bought this boat back to look for answers. But now that I’m staring at those old books, I feel like a child again, and the idea of finding out the real truth…it’s terrifying. Better to wonder than to know you’re not loved.
I slam the wardrobe door closed, leaving the logbooks scattered where they are.
“Just don’t read them,” I say, my back still to Lexi, my breath coming fast. “OK?”
“We’ve got to read them eventually, surely. What if they might tell us something useful?” Lexi says. “About the boat, I mean.”
“They won’t.”
“Zeke, there are very few things on this boat. We need to make use of everything we have.”
“Just leave it, Lexi.”
“Can you tell me why?”
There’s a gentleness to the way Lexi’s pushing that reminds me of Brady. He’s the one who suggested therapy, and who gave me the shove to apply to Davide’s restaurant when I was just a grill chef at a fast-food chain. All of a sudden I miss him so much—I wish he were here to crack a dumb joke, chill me out, distract me.
I’m breathing hard. That childlike version of me is still here, scared and unloved. Everything’s right on the surface and I can’t shove it down, but there’s nowhere to go, either, no way to walk away.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lexi says.
I realize I’ve been standing here saying nothing for ages. My skin starts to prickle. I hate it when I don’t notice myself zoning out like this.
“As in,” she clarifies, “when you want to talk about why those logbooks make you so uncomfortable, I’ll be here.” She stretches her hands out. “I really don’t have anywhere else to be.”
I swallow, keeping my face turned from hers. “Yeah, thanks.”
“And I’m like a dog with a bone once I want an answer on something,” she says, after a moment. “So sooner rather than later would save you some aggro.”
Eugene makes a noise out on the deck, a kind of haww-haaw-haaww , and it’s pretty earsplitting even from here in the bedroom. Both Lexi and I jump.
“Fuck me!” she yells, clutching her chest and glaring toward the door, but she’s already moving to go check on him. “Saved by the seagull,” she says over her shoulder at me as we cross the living area.
I breathe a little easier as the bedroom door closes, calming down now that the books are behind me. I knew rescuing that bird was a good idea.
We brought him out onto the deck to get some air while we were hacking away at the tarpaulin with my precious knife. I announced hours ago that he’s already looking better, which he definitely is. Lexi said he’s looking the same, mainly because he’s a bird and birds always look the same .
“Zeke,” Lexi says.
There’s something about her tone. I don’t know Lexi all that well, really, but I know exactly what it means when she says my name like that.
It means there’s hope.
I climb up to the deck, and in two steps I’m beside her, over by the railing, waving my arms, jumping up and down as Lexi screams, “Hey! Hey!”
There’s a ship.
When you’ve stared at the sea for hours on end wishing for something, actually seeing it there is totally surreal. The ship’s massive, loaded with containers—from this distance it looks like a toy made of Lego blocks.
We’re both jumping and screaming. Eugene’s cawing by our feet. My throat already hurts, and Lexi whacks the side of my head as she sweeps her arms back and forth, and we just keep going and keep going, but so does the ship.
“It’s not…” Lexi’s breathless. She grips the rail, bending over for a moment, head down. “It’s not coming this way. It’s not changing direction. It’s not seen us.”
“Hey! Help! Help!” I scream, still jumping. I’m not giving up. This is it. This is our rescue. This is when we go home.
“Zeke, it’s getting smaller.”
“Help us! Help!”
My voice breaks. It hits me that from this distance they likely can’t see us at all. Even if they can, even if we’re a speck on their screens, we’re not radioing them or sending up a flare—there’s no reason for them to think we’re in distress.
I’ve thought so much about what might happen to us out here, but it’s not occurred to me once that a boat might come and we might not get rescued.
Lexi starts yelling and jumping again beside me. Eugene shifts from one foot to the other, stressed out. I scream until I’m hoarse and the cargo ship has silently vanished.
And then Lexi just goes wild.
“This cannot! Be! Happening!” she screams, kicking the folded deck chair and then doubling over.
I crouch down, pressing my hands to my cheeks. Beside us, Eugene keeps squawking, wings flapping.
“Hey,” I say, as she sobs. “Lexi, it’ll be OK. It’ll be OK. Another ship will come.”
“Shut up! You don’t know! You don’t know! It won’t be OK, we’re going to die out here and Mae will be traumatized and Penny will be alone…And there’s so much…Fuck. I’ve not done anything! I’ve done nothing interesting in my whole entire life and now it’s about to be over!”
Her face is blotchy and wet. I’d do anything to make her feel better.
“The ship just didn’t spot us, but this is good, we saw a ship. That means there will be more ships, right? We’ve got tons of food and water. There’s wood for the burner if it gets cold. The boat has held up until now. We’ll be fine.”
“You don’t believe any of that,” Lexi says into her hands. “One ship in two days and it didn’t even come close to us. You know we’re screwed.”
I don’t know what else to say. I’m all out. My heart’s aching.
“Can I give you a hug?” I ask, still crouched opposite her with Eugene in his box between us.
“What? Yes, fucking hell, just because we’ve said no sex doesn’t mean you can just squat over there while I’m having a breakdown,” Lexi sobs, and to my surprise, that makes me laugh.
I stand as she unfolds herself and I pull her into my arms. She smells of that perfume I caught on the first night—kind of lemony—but she also smells of the houseboat, and of the sea.
“This is so bad,” she says into my shoulder, her whole body shaking as she cries. “This is really, really, really…”
“I know,” I say. I stare out at the water. It’s so empty again, as if it’s reset to screen saver. I’m angry. Furious. Shaking with it. That ship just left . That’s not…It’s not fair .
“I can’t do this, Zeke.”
“You can. You’re doing it. You’ve been doing it for two days and two nights and we’re still here.”
She presses into me. I hold her tighter.
“I don’t want to die,” she says.
“Don’t say that,” I tell her, tipping my cheek to rest against the soft fuzz of her bun. “That’s exactly what people say when they’re about to die.”
That makes her laugh. I smile. Not many people would have laughed at that, given the circumstances.
“Do you know what I really want to do right now?” she asks, voice still muffled in my T-shirt.
“What do you want to do?”
She pulls away from me with a sniff, wiping her face with her arm. “I want to get drunk,” she says.