Zeke
Zeke
We sleep in the bed that’s become ours now, her head on my chest, her leg over mine. I’m happy. Happier than should be possible when you’re in this much danger.
I never realized sex could feel the way it felt last night. It was as if I could finally express that huge emotion in my chest, the expansive one I don’t have words for. I’ve always felt a connection through sex, but I’ve never felt closeness like that, never felt like I was…making love, I guess. The first time was hot and fast, forehead to forehead, so intense I thought I might cry, and the best part was that it wouldn’t have mattered even if I had—Lexi knows me so well, I didn’t have to hold a single part of myself back.
I slip out first thing to go and check on the boat while she gets some more sleep. It’s raining today, and it’s breezier, too. I bite my lip the minute I open the door from the houseboat’s deck. That water patch on the kitchen floor is back, about the same size as when I last looked, maybe bigger. And when I check the bathroom, the shower drain cover’s floated off, too—the sea must’ve got rougher last night. I fix it all back, cold dread in my stomach as I wipe up the water in the kitchen and check again and again for where it could be coming from. There’s just…nowhere. Maybe the hole’s so small I can’t see it?
When I get back to the dorm room, Lexi’s sitting up in bed, round-eyed, duvet drawn close to her chest. I sit down beside her.
“You OK?” I say, frowning.
She leans into me, closing her eyes.
“I woke up and you were gone,” she says.
“Shit, sorry—I should’ve left a note. I just went to check on the boat, I didn’t want to wake you.” I reach for her hand.
“It’s fine, I just…need you, I think,” she whispers. “Probably more than I should.”
I kiss the top of her head. “I need you, too, you know.” My voice is husky. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
A loud bang cuts across the end of my sentence. Lexi freezes. Her hands gripping my jumper. A bang . Another bang . Both of us turn to the window.
“What do you…”
“Come on.” She’s already flying out of the door, grabbing her leather jacket as she runs into the corridor.
There’ve been a hell of a lot of surreal moments in the last ten days. The word’s almost lost meaning. But I don’t know what else to call it as I step out and see a walkway crumpling into the sea as if it’s a model built of paper.
The sound’s so enormous it makes me think of a dinosaur’s roar. Metal buckles as though it’s melting, and Lexi swears, grabbing for me, stumbling back toward the shelter of the emergency exit door. The noise is deafening. A bone-shaking crack, the scream of steel on steel. Chunks of metal slide and topple, then the bulk of the tumbling walkway must hit the sea, because there’s a deep crash, and then, a few seconds later, a slow-motion wall of water reaching up into the sky.
It’s white-gray and deadly. Lexi and I realize the danger at the same moment, fumbling at the door handle, throwing ourselves inside and slamming the door behind us as the wave comes looming across the concrete, slapping down so hard it shakes the windows in their frames. Lexi is saying something, clinging to me, and it takes me too long to process it, so she says it again, louder, eyes even wider.
“Zeke. Zeke. We have to get off this rig.”
The last few bits and pieces tumble—broken pipes, chunks of grating, a cord of cable spiraling down into the water. We watch it all through the window by the door, holding each other tightly. Lexi’s shaking in my arms.
“It’s settling. It was just that one part of the rig,” I say.
“Look at the damage it’s done to the platforms below. Who knows what it’ll have done to the rest of the rig. And the houseboat . Oh my God. Zeke…What if the houseboat is damaged?”
I close my eyes, but the rig seems to lurch beneath me, so I open them again, grabbing at the windowsill. Lexi looks at me weirdly—maybe that lurch never happened. I’m shaking, too, I think. Am I? I’m so used to this kind of fear that I guess I’ve switched into survival mode again without noticing.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you needed to know,” I begin, and Lexi is already saying, “What? Zeke, what?”
“There’s a leak on the boat.”
“No, no, no,” she says, burying her face in my chest.
“And it’s getting harder to block the drain. The rougher the sea is, the more seems to come up.”
Lexi makes a moaning sound in the back of her throat. Outside, the seagulls have come to inspect the broken corner of the rig, hopping casually between severed pillars. It’s the platform we crossed to go from one ladder to the next when we were climbing the tower. Lexi stood on that platform two days ago. The thought makes me want to throw up.
“If the boat’s not safe, we can stay here,” I say. “Someone will come.”
“Nobody ever comes!” Lexi shouts, balling her fists as she draws back to stare out of the window again. “We can’t stay here. It’s too risky.”
She bites her lip and reaches up to re-do her bun. She ties it tightly, the way she does when she wants to feel in control. Her fingers are still trembling.
“You know what we have to do,” she says.
I close my eyes for a moment. If that houseboat’s damaged, if it’s gone under…I pull Lexi close again.
“You have to be OK,” I say roughly.
“Zeke…”
“No, I mean it. You have to be OK. OK?”
She presses her head to my chest. “I’ll try,” she whispers. “I don’t know that either of us can promise more than that.”
I’ve never felt so glad to see The Merry Dormouse .
She’s still there under the rig, bobbing on the spot, looking so—I don’t know. Harmless. Helpful. Ready to rescue us, like she didn’t cause this whole nightmare in the first place.
It’s dim inside the boat. Above us, the rig lets out a jarring creak, and I shiver.
“This is it?” Lexi says, pointing to the small pool of water on the kitchen floor.
“I just can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”
Lexi frowns, checking the ceiling, the walls.
“Me neither.” She sighs, rubbing her forehead. “What do we do? Stay or go?”
I know what I’d always pick back home. I know what she’d choose, too. Lexi’s the person who stays, the one you want in your corner, and I’m the drifter.
But no part of me wants to sail away right now.
“The rig’s so big. Even if bits of it keep falling off, surely it’s safer than this?” I say, moving through to the bathroom. “I mean, Lexi, look.”
She swears under her breath. The drain cover has floated off again, and there’s at least two inches of seawater in the base of the shower.
“We watched a platform we’ve walked on falling into the sea,” Lexi says from behind me, reaching for the little cup and bucket I’ve been using to bail out the shower water. “We’ve done days at sea with this drain leaking. And the other leak is small—if we find it, we can plug it.”
I close my eyes and lean a hand against the bathroom wall for a moment.
“Zeke?”
“It’s just weird being back here again.”
“I know. I really thought we would never get back on this bloody boat. But…”
She comes over, nudging under my arm and wrapping herself around me. I let the warm fluff of her giant blond bun bat against my cheek, the way it always does when she holds me like this. The smell of the houseboat is making me feel a million things. They’re not good things. I breathe in Lexi instead.
“We’d have to leave Eugene behind,” I whisper. “He’s up there with all the other seagulls now and I don’t even know which one’s him.”
“Oh my God, Zeke…”
“I know. I know. I’m an idiot.”
She grips me tighter, that bucket still in her hand, pressed to my back. “Shut up, you’re not, you’re just…You get attached. Eugene lived with us here, and you ended up loving him even though he’s a selfish little shit who ate loads of our bread. There’s probably a name for it. It’s probably a syndrome, falling in love with someone just because you’re stuck with them.”
I wonder if we’re really talking about Eugene here.
“This isn’t even a choice, Zeke. Staying feels like the safe option, but it isn’t, not anymore. The boat got us this far,” Lexi whispers into my T-shirt.
“Let’s just dry out the shower and see if we can plug the leak,” I say. “Then we can take it from there.”
Once we’ve resecured the drain cover as best we can, we get down on hands and knees in the kitchen and check every inch of the place. It’s so hard because everything is damp—it doesn’t help that it’s raining today. Houseboats are always a bit wet; that’s what Dad used to tell us when Lyra complained about her clothes smelling of damp.
“Here, this plank looks like it’s been fixed before,” Lexi says, voice strained as she leans into one of the lower kitchen cupboards. “And it’s definitely wet.”
There’s a small clunk .
“Zeke,” Lexi says.
I stiffen. “What?”
“There’s something…else. In here.”
I sit down next to her, shuffling so I’ve got my back to the fridge and my feet wedged against the wall by the bathroom door. She turns, still crouched, an A5 plastic wallet in her hands.
It’s filled with papers. They look like printouts from an old computer—there’s something about the font and the spacing that’d make it obvious even if the paper wasn’t all worn and yellow.
“Oh,” I say, staring down at the wallet.
“Secrets?” Lexi guesses.
“Very Dad,” I say. “So…yeah. I guess so.”
“It could be about anything,” Lexi says. “These could just be tax returns.”
“I’m not sure my dad paid all that much tax,” I say dryly.
“Insurance forms. Some random stuff that he didn’t mean to hit print on. Spare paper, basically.”
I say nothing. I’m certain the plastic wallet in Lexi’s hands holds the answer to the question I’ve been asking my whole life, and I don’t have a clue what to do about it.
“On the plus side,” Lexi says, “I’ve found the leak. It’s a pipe. I can tighten the join—I’ll go get some tools from the rig. I’ll…”
She stands, but I reach up and grab her hand.
“Do I read it?” I ask.
I look. The top piece of paper seems to be an email. I try not to read it, but I see my dad’s email address, and one I don’t recognize, and a few words, two of which are Paige Lowe . As in, busybody neighbor Paige. What the hell’s she got to do with anything?
“You know what?” Lexi says, sitting down again, keeping hold of my hand. “I think there is absolutely no right answer to that question.”
“I feel like if I don’t read it now, I’ll spend another week ignoring it, like I did with the logbooks. And I don’t want to do that.”
She smiles slightly. Her eyes are as icy blue as always, but they’re at their absolute warmest.
“I think you bought this houseboat because you had a whole bunch of questions, and that wallet looks to me like a whole bunch of answers,” she says.
Now that I’m holding the wallet, I’m not sure I really did buy this houseboat because I had a whole bunch of questions. I think maybe I bought it because I miss my dad.
My finger slides to the snap holding the flap of the wallet closed. I hover there, a shot of fear hitting my stomach. Sometimes the big moments in your life are disguised as nothings. The cold, drunk minutes I spent with Paige and Lexi on Gilmouth marina. The sight of Jeremy’s name popping up on my phone five and a half years ago, the call that told me my father had had a heart attack.
But right now I know I’m sitting inside a moment that’ll change my life. It’s eerie, like standing between two mirrors, or looking down from the top of the rig tower. Like facing something vast.
I click open the snap.