Lexi
Lexi
It’s a rough night.
I crawl to the bedroom sometime around midmorning. There’s an endless, dull throbbing in the back of my head, a low bass note that won’t let up. The sound of the waves is even louder in the bedroom—it’s as if we’re in an echo chamber down here, and it seeps into my dreams, turning into womb sounds, the rhythmic ache of a heartbeat.
At some point I stumble to the toilet, catching a gray-white sky through the windows as the walls and cabinets slide in my vision. The houseboat isn’t cute now, with all its slightly-too-small chairs and drawers and cupboards. It’s hellish, like a dollhouse in a horror film. I fall on my way back into the bedroom and Zeke is there, catching me, though I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m awake, because that seems like the sort of thing I’d dream up.
I wake in the afternoon with a horrible taste in my mouth and a sheen of sweat all over me—by the time I eventually stripped out of my damp clothes, I was ice-cold, and Zeke layered me in blankets. I think of him calling himself stupid, and it makes me not just sad but angry . Who fucking dared make him feel that way?
“Hey, you’re up,” he says softly, pushing the door open. “How’s your head feeling? And your stomach? Could you eat something?”
“I knew you’d say that,” I say, lifting my head and shoulders to look at him. “Are you like this when you’re not rationing every last grain of rice?”
“What, always planning the next meal? Yup. You should see my recipe notebooks from when I first started at Davide’s.”
His hair has dried—it’s softer and fluffier than usual. He’s wearing his battered, stained velvet trousers, and a pin-striped shirt of mine, which he has French-tucked into his waistband to disguise the poor fit. I find this nod to fashion completely adorable.
“I hope I will see them, one day.”
I look up at the skylight as he tidies around me. The rain has subsided to a light, airy drizzle, like the fine spray that creeps past the shower curtain. God, what I’d give for a shower.
“Isn’t it funny that you and your dad both wrote down your thoughts? You with your recipe notebooks, him with his logbooks?”
He keeps his face averted. “Guess so. I’d never thought about it like that.”
I watch him as he shuffles around the bed, head ducked. It says so much about his relationship with his father that he still hasn’t dared to open one of those logbooks. My heart aches for him. I think he’s more afraid to confirm what his dad thought of him than he is to know the truth about his parentage. I almost want to say, It’s not so bad, you know, watching your father turn away from you , but I’d be lying. Dad leaving us the way he did, it made me who I am, and not in a good way.
“So. What could you manage to eat?” Zeke asks, chucking the blankets into the corner.
I am immediately itching to fold those.
“Digestive?” I say. “How many are left?”
“Plenty,” he says, and I know he’d give them all to me, and it makes me want to weep, that kindness, all his kindness.
I should get up and fetch some food myself , my brain says, but I’m too tired for that old crap, and right now it’s easier than usual to say, Actually, why not just let someone else do the work for a minute?
Zeke heads into the kitchen to bring me a digestive, then reaches for the moldy bread that he keeps in a plastic Tesco bag in the back of the left-hand cupboard. “I’ll just go see if Eugene is about. Bucket by the bed in case the biscuit turns out to be a bad plan.”
“We should not be giving that bread to the bird,” I say halfheartedly, resting the digestive flat on my palm, just contemplating it. The idea of eating moldy bread makes me want to vomit again, but before the rain came, I really felt the perilousness of our limited supplies. “There’s no way to get more food, Zeke.”
“I’m working on making a fishing pole,” he says, but he looks torn. “All right. No bread for Eugene.”
He puts back the plastic bag and starts checking the storm-proofing on the cupboards. The nausea rolls in the base of my empty stomach like something we’ve left loose on the deck.
“He can catch himself fish to eat now,” I say. “He’s up and about again.”
“Right, yeah, exactly,” Zeke says, not looking at me.
“And we might actually starve, you know. This is serious.”
“Of course.”
The same voice that told me to rest says, You love that bird .
“Just don’t give him loads, OK?” I say. “Hold some back.”
The smile Zeke shoots me could melt chocolate. “Yeah,” he says, reaching for the bag again. “I’ll be sensible.”
I settle back into the pillows with an exhale as I hear him step out onto the deck, the door swinging shut behind him. The rainwater I’ve been drinking all night seems to have worked a small miracle on my body—I can almost feel myself plumping up, as though my blood is flowing faster. I nibble at the edge of my precious digestive and my mouth even manages to generate a small flood of saliva.
“Lexi!” Zeke roars.
My nausea evaporates for a moment, replaced by something sharper: panic.
“What? Zeke?”
“Can you come out onto the deck?” He’s already back in the bedroom doorway, hair wild, eyes wilder.
“I think so?” I say, swiveling my legs out of the bed and standing gingerly, reaching for the arm he offers me.
Everything wobbles around the edges when I stand, as if I’ve just twisted a camera lens and lost focus. We move through the living area so slowly, and I keep saying to Zeke, “ Tell me, tell me ,” but he just says, “ Come on, you have to see .” The deck is slippery; I have to step over our various rainwater-collection bowls, registering the volume in each one even as I follow the path of Zeke’s finger.
“ Look ,” Zeke says, pointing to the horizon above the body of the boat.
It’s…a building. That’s what it looks like. A strange gray building on thick stilts in the water, distant, but directly ahead of us, at twelve o’clock to The Merry Dormouse ’s nose. It looks monstrous, like something out of a Transformer film, and as I stare at it, I begin to see that it’s a platform with metal structures on its top. The legs are reddish; there’s some kind of crane on there, tilted at an awkward angle, like a bird’s neck looking down into the water below.
“An oil rig,” Zeke says. His voice is thick with excitement and his hands are gripping the rail. “It’ll be full of workers, Lexi. People . We’re safe. We’re saved.”
I double over—knocked by the boat, and by the shock of it.
I fall to my knees. We’re safe. The cold seawater soaks into my socks and the deck scrapes my bare skin.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” I chant, pressing my forehead against my arm. There is nothing like this—nothing like the rising, growing, exploding euphoria of believing things will actually be OK. A bowl of rainwater tips against my thigh, dousing me, and I hardly feel the cold, like it’s happening to somebody else.
Zeke’s laughing. “We did it. We did it. We didn’t die!”
The realist in me sits up at this. “We still need to get there,” I say, resting back on my heels and reaching one hand out to hold myself steady.
Zeke peers over the side of the boat. I hate it when he does that. He always leans so far, like a little boy who can’t resist going right to the edge.
“Honestly, it looks like the current is taking us roughly the right way,” he says. “Can we use the sail and the helm? They’ll send someone out when we get close enough anyway.”
I get to my feet and stare out at the water, the oil rig, the water, the oil rig. I can’t believe it’s real. For a second, I think to myself, What if we’ve gone mad and it’s a mirage? before realizing that I have no idea what an oil rig looks like, so this would have been some seriously inventive imagining on my part.
Zeke and I busy ourselves unfastening the sail. I pull my hair up into a tangled bun with the band around my wrist, wincing as I tug at the tender skin of my head injury. I imagine the people on that oil rig, what they’ll think, how they’ll greet us. How they’ll look at the bump on my head and the cut across Zeke’s stomach with first aid kits to hand, how they’ll sterilize them, give us bottled water…
Zeke’s talking, not really saying much in particular—“ Oh my God, I knew we’d do it, I knew we’d be all right ”—but I feel as though I’m floating, only half here. I’m going to see Mae again. I’m going to get home. I cling to the flagpole as The Merry Dormouse lurches her way onward and I feel a pang of genuine love for her. What a boat. She’s been a hero, and her job is almost done. Thank God—I’m not sure how many more ways we can plug up that shower drain, and though Zeke’s not talked to me about it, I know he’s been fixing up holes in the ceiling ever since the rain started.
The next hour is another crash course in sailing, if you can even call it that. There are a terrifying few minutes in which we steer ourselves the wrong way in the wind, and every so often The Merry Dormouse seems to rear forward when the sail fills with air, and my stomach drops, because I’m sure we’ve gone too hard and she’ll dip her nose into the sea and upend us. I’m dogged with a total conviction that something will go wrong any second: we’ll hit something, or capsize, and the people on the rig won’t get to us in time to save us.
Eugene squawks anxiously as Zeke and I alternate between grappling with the billowing sail and turning the wheel; both of us hit ourselves with the boom hard enough to bruise our already-battered bodies, and we’re slow, breathless, weak. But we’re heading the right way. We’re heading toward safety. For the first time in so long, we’re not just floating helplessly—we’re doing something to save ourselves.
The closer we get to the rig, the more detail we can see: the gaps between the metal structures, showing tiny fragments of sky; the worn-down stripes on the great concrete legs, battered by the sea. At some point Zeke hands me a slice of sweating cheese on a stale cracker and I eat it without thinking, hardly noticing the taste until it makes me nauseous again and I gag over the side of the boat.
As the rig looms larger, we each snatch a moment to go inside and pack up our belongings. It’s bizarre. I stand in the bedroom, and for a moment I am genuinely unable to fathom the idea of leaving this tiny space.
I meticulously repack my bag with everything I hung up in the wardrobe. I find my purse at the back of the bedside drawer and unzip it, looking at my driving license, my credit card, all these little plastic symbols of a life that feels completely alien now. I imagine paying contactless for something and it makes me want to laugh.
Zeke’s bag is by the bed, packed exactly how I’d expect Zeke to pack—haphazardly. The end result is a duffel bag so full he’s only been able to half close the zip, and as I carry it out onto the deck with mine, I see what’s sitting in the top.
The logbooks. They’re all in there.
I look at him standing beside the sail, up on the roof, wind in his curls.
“Did you…?” I begin.
He clocks what I’ve seen.
“No.” He gives me a lopsided, closed-mouthed smile. “I tried opening one of them and slammed it shut again. I dunno. There’s a lot going on right now.”
I tilt my head as I look up at him from the deck, like, All right, I’ll give you that . We’ve barely stopped for the last two hours, and this small pocket of stillness in the frenzy of the day feels almost nostalgic now, as if we’re going back to the time when we were frozen and floating with nowhere to go. All of a sudden I feel dizzyingly emotional.
“I’m glad it was you,” he says, so softly I almost don’t hear him over the wind. “On this adventure with me.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“Uh-huh. Adventure. Quest. Mission.”
“Not two clueless arseholes drifting around?”
“Definitely not,” he says. “Have you seen yourself right now?”
My hand is on the wheel, my feet planted on the deck, my hair whipping in the wind. I can’t bear how he’s looking at me—there’s something sweet and tender about it, and this is starting to feel like a good-bye.
“You look amazing,” he says.
For a moment, up there on the roof of the houseboat, his eyes are just like they were on that first night: hot, intense, fixed on mine like they don’t want to let me go. I’ve seen glimmers of that desire on his face in the last week, but he shuts it down so effectively I sometimes think I imagine them.
He shifts to the edge in a crouch, sliding so his feet hang over the door, and reaches a hand out for mine. I think he’s asking me to help him down, but once he grips me, he just stays there, holding my hand. The sensation of his skin against mine starts at my palm, but it spreads in warm sparks, up my arm, through my chest, right to the core of me. He slides his thumb slowly across mine, as if he’s tracing the shape of me to memorize it.
Then he drops my hand. “Sorry,” he says, eyes widening. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s OK,” I say, but he’s already getting back up on his feet, dodging the swinging sail.
“No, it’s not,” he says, and I can’t see him now behind the tarp. “I made a promise about what would happen on this boat, and it wasn’t that.”
I look at the approaching rig. I don’t argue the point with him. Not because I give a damn about that rule we made anymore, but because in a matter of minutes, everything will be different.
We won’t be on this boat, for starters.
The nerves set in the closer we get to the rig. I expected to see someone up there by now—we’re near enough that we’d be able to see figures, and I imagined they’d be waving to us, maybe even sending out a life raft. But the rig is silent and still.
We’re so close now that I can see the rust and peeling paint. It’s cooler here in the rig’s monstrous shadow, and the quietness is eerie. I’m beginning to feel afraid.
“Lexi?” Zeke says.
“It’s fine, it’ll be fine,” I say, and then: “We need to get closer, and they’re not…sending anyone out, or anything…”
I frown. We’re drifting onward, but the rig isn’t quite where I expected it to be in my line of vision. I thought we were heading straight for it, but…
“Are we…”
“Yeah,” Zeke says grimly.
He’s already turning the wheel, but the breeze is slower here; it doesn’t seem to move us at all. We’re now about twenty feet from the rig’s structure: I can see a ladder, tantalizingly close, and a gathering of crustaceans just above where the water touches one of the pillars rising out of the sea. A seagull caws, and Eugene stirs in his box, seeming tamer than ever compared to the birds looping above us.
I swear, looking up at the slackness of the sail, then back to Zeke, who is twisting the wheel, sinews standing out on his forearms. Could we make a paddle big enough to help us steer this houseboat? Suddenly the boat that has seemed so small for the last week seems absolutely enormous. I clutch at my chest, clutch at the railings, because we’re drifting on by, and there’s the ladder, there, there, sliding away from us in horrible slow motion.
“We’re going to miss it,” Zeke says. “We’re going to—”
“Help!” I yell, tilting my head up. My voice is so small compared to the awful grandeur of this place. It echoes, but the sound is lost under the slap and whoosh of the waves. “Help us! Help!”
Nobody comes. The boat drifts on. This is the slowest, most torturous way to lose all hope.
I clench my jaw and bend to unfasten my boots. “I’m going to do something.”
I pull my shirt off over my head, then grab the rope curled on the deck, the one we use to lower our bucket in and out of the sea, the one that started this mess in the first place. I begin to tie it around my waist.
“Lexi?”
“I’ll swim across.”
My hands are shaking so much it’s hard to secure a knot; the rope is too tight, cutting into the bare skin of my midriff, but I’m already readying myself to dive into the water. The breeze sends my skin goose-pimpling, and a wave touches my bare feet, startlingly cold.
“That’s—Lexi, no—you’ll get hurt!”
“What the fuck else are we going to do!” I yell, hating the way my voice is shaking, hating how hard it is to force myself through the gap in the railings onto that ledge at the edge of the boat, the one I walked along, drunk, wondering what it would feel like to let myself fall.
I’m only a few meters away from something to hold on to. It’s not like I’m diving into the open ocean, the way Zeke did to save Eugene. But all the same, I’m so scared I can’t form a cohesive thought, like all the parts of it are scattering in the wind.
I dive. The cold grips me a second after I hit the water, like the pain did yesterday when I hit my head—it strikes with the same hammer blow, and I gasp, mouth burning as I swallow seawater. I’m afraid I’ll be too cold to swim, but my limbs move, sluggish but insistent. One stroke, another. My muscles begin to burn. The rope is slack, and it tangles around my left leg—for a moment I panic, but I manage to kick it free and forge on, letting it float behind me.
Zeke is shouting something I can’t catch. This is the hardest thing my body has done in a very long time. I’m so broken from the last twenty-four hours—I’m astonished I have any strength in me. I let out a roar as I get close, a hand’s width from the ladder, my nose and mouth full of seawater. When my knuckles strike metal, I almost go under with the relief of it. I hold myself there with both arms wrapped around the bar, wet rust painting my arms, flaky and blood-red. Zeke whoops across the water. I have just enough breath to manage a laugh.
“Lexi Taylor!” he yells. “You just did that! You really just did that!”
I look back. It is so strange seeing The Merry Dormouse from the outside after all this time—it looks rougher than when I saw it last, its paint dulled and worn, that wonky, wild sail sticking out of its roof like a flag on a kid’s sandcastle.
And it’s still moving. If this rope around my middle strains taut, then I’m about to be pulled into the tide with the weight of a whole houseboat.
I swear, scrabbling for a foothold on the ladder. Now that the adrenaline of the swim is easing off, I’m so cold and my muscles are so strained that even moving my own weight through the water is an effort.
“You can do this,” Zeke calls, and it shouldn’t help—what a ridiculously banal thing for him to say in the circumstances—but it does.
I’m up now, on shaking legs, knees knocking against the metal, my numb hands already fumbling to undo the rope around my middle.
I don’t know how to tie a rope properly. That much has been made fairly obvious. I don’t even know what I do, looping bits around other bits and through metal bars, all the while trembling all over, standing there on a ladder in the North Sea in my M instead, I rest my head against the ladder, close my eyes and start to cry.