Zeke
Zeke
It takes us about an hour to get set up. With the rig groaning around us and the seagulls circling above, we take our bags and as much water and food onto the boat as we can without risking weighing The Merry Dormouse down. Then we get every sheet off every bed in the whole rig and tie them together.
“I feel like I’m at a hen party,” Lexi says. “Here, pass the rum, would you?”
I hand it over. She sprinkles the sheet in alcohol before reaching for the next one.
“There’s always some kind of bizarre booze-fueled crafting activity involved in a hen do.”
“This bizarre?”
“Maybe not this bizarre. Though this is a lot more useful to me than a flower crown.”
The rig creaks again. Both of us glance at the heap of untied sheets, then at each other.
“Do we call it?” she says.
I’m hating every second of being here. I don’t know if the rig always made these sounds and I just got used to it, or whether it’s got a lot noisier, but I can’t help feeling like any second now we’re going to be crushed under a falling crane. So yeah, I want to leave. But I also know this is a real shot at getting rescued, and I don’t want to miss it because we lost our nerve too soon.
“One more,” I say, grabbing for another bottle of alcohol.
Our hands touch—she reached for that one, too. I look up at her and she smiles briefly. She’s wild-haired, sweat glistening across her nose and forehead, and I can feel her terror, but Lexi has this fierce energy to her in a crisis, too. She’s just…amazing.
“You ever made a Molotov cocktail, Zeke?” she says.
“No.” I look back at the bottle of rum. “But I have played a lot of video games featuring them?”
“That’ll do,” she says, her eyes widening slightly as the rig lets out another roaring groan beneath us. “Now. Where are the matches?”
This is the wildest, craziest thing I’ve ever done.
“Well done!” Lexi says, her cheek twitching slightly. “No, really, it’s great.”
“Why’s it not…bigger?”
“It’s the perfect size!”
I cut her a look. She blinks back, her cheeks still giving away the smile she’s trying to hide.
“Will you stop taking the piss?”
She flashes me a quick-fire grin.
“Taking the piss? Whatever do you mean? I’m here to make you look fanciable, aren’t I? And to fluff your ego? This is an action film, right?”
I grab for her, and she dances away, then sobers as a distant rumble sounds somewhere deep in the rig below us.
“I’m pretty sure we broke a lot of laws for this,” I say, eyeing the gently smoking building in the center of the rig.
We’re standing by the ladder down to the houseboat, watching our handiwork in action. The action’s just a bit…low-key. When I threw the flaming rum bottle into the alcohol-soaked building, with its trail of sheets running toward the basement, I fled to the ladder hand in hand with Lexi, heart in throat, blood pounding. But…nothing really happened. So now we’re hovering at the ladder, wondering if we need to try again.
I figured a burning oil rig was a sign nobody could miss. Nothing says We were here like arson. But this little trail of smoke’s just getting snatched by the wind.
“I wanted more drama,” I say, squinting against the bright white-gray sky.
“Oh well. If I’ve learned anything these last two weeks,” Lexi says, patting my arm, “it’s that drama is overrated.”
Boom .
Flame, brightness, sparks, something flying through the air—something metal, maybe, rearing toward us, screeching as it hits the grating—and a flurry of seagulls screaming, rising up through a thick cloud of smoke billowing dark against the sky.
“Oh, fuck,” Lexi says, scrabbling backward, hand flying to grab my jumper. “Go, go, go!”
We almost throw ourselves down the ladder as that chunk of metal goes tumbling over the side a meter or so to our left. I can smell fire and the bitter sharpness of alcohol, and something flat and nasty that smells a lot like gas.
“Get on!” I shout down at Lexi, already fumbling with the ropes.
I don’t have time to think about how this’ll work. I just untie the second rope and then leap before the houseboat can swing away from me, landing on the deck with a knee-jarring thump, stumbling into Lexi and pushing us both into the helm with the impact. My wound wrenches and I gasp.
“We need to move, we need to move ! Why isn’t she going faster?” Lexi says, then she ducks and screams as something drops into the sea beside us with a hiss of sparks meeting seawater.
It’s dark above us and flickering with firelight. I can hear the fire’s sinister low crackle through the sound of the waves and the scream of the rig as it burns. The seagulls are already gone, black Vs in a distant patch of sky. I spare a fleeting thought for Eugene, heart hurting. I hope he’s gone with them, away from the smoke and the ash, off to the open ocean.
“We’re getting somewhere,” I say, voice raised. I lean over the side to look at the waves, as if I can will the current to carry us faster. “We’re moving, Lexi, we are. Here, get inside.”
“Is that even safer?” she says, voice thick with panic.
We both duck again as another sizzling chunk of steel goes plunging into the sea.
“Inside,” Lexi says, already wrenching the door open. “Got it.”
So here we are. Back on the fucking houseboat.
I stare at the rig, now a distant, burning pillar on the horizon. We definitely made an impact. Smoke stains the sky, and I can still see the orange-red-yellow of flames licking at the tower we once climbed, can still hear the occasional roar and rumble as something collapses. It’s midafternoon—three or four, I’d guess—and there’s a tie-dye effect to the horizon, white to blue behind the blazing rig. The sea’s smoother than it was when we arrived, rockier than it was when we first woke up after our one-night stand. I’d call it a solid three out of ten, zero being dead-lake mode, ten being we-are-dead.
“Are you OK?” Lexi asks, coming up behind me on the deck. “Or as OK as a person can be when…”
“I’m fine.”
I don’t know what else to say. I feel like this is all happening to someone else. We’re both a bit high on the adrenaline, maybe. And I know I’m shell-shocked from finding out about Jeremy. I feel almost nothing at all when I approach the thought, just a kind of…blankness, like the whole area’s numb.
“Fine,” Lexi repeats, sounding unconvinced.
“I’m…compartmentalizing.” I gesture in one direction. “Over here, we have the fact that I spent my whole life believing my father wasn’t my father. Over here”—I gesture in the direction of the sun—“we have the fact that said father is dead, so I can’t tell him I’m sorry. And over here, straight ahead, we have the likelihood of dying at sea.”
“Is there a nice compartment? For puppies and rainbows?” Lexi points to a random bit of sky. “Maybe over here?”
I point to her. “The nice compartment,” I say, before pulling her into my arms.
“Oh yeah, I am so puppies and rainbows. Really, though, you’re processing something huge, and you’re having to do it in very…”
“Damp conditions?”
“I was going to say stressful conditions. You did just flee from a burning oil rig.”
“Excuse me. I just set fire to an oil rig.”
“Well, yeah, that, too. But now you’re back on a smelly, leaky houseboat with a big crack in the roof, so I get it if you don’t feel like you’re coping right now, given everything. I mean, I’m not sure I’m coping, and I didn’t just find out something massive about my family. I’m purely dealing with the fact that I hate this bloody boat, and that’s hard enough.”
I kiss the top of her head, bun-dodging. “You don’t mean that. You called this boat a hero two days ago.”
“OK,” she says reluctantly. “I don’t hate her. But…”
“Go on?”
“No. It’s embarrassing.”
“Is it as embarrassing as tying a houseboat to itself?”
“Is anything that embarrassing?”
“Well, then.”
She sniffs. “I just miss Eugene a bit,” she says, lifting her chin. “That’s all. It’s not the same on here without him.” She whacks my arm. “Don’t do that face.”
“What face?”
“The ‘I knew you had a heart of gold all along’ face.”
“This is my ‘I set fire to oil rigs’ face, thank you very much.”
“No, your ‘I set fire to oil rigs’ face is much more regal.” She adopts a serious expression to demonstrate. “See? It’s akin to but subtly different from your ‘this houseboat fridge still smells’ face.”
I love you , I almost say. I love you even though I have only known you for eleven days, and I know that’s mad and I don’t even care.
“I miss Eugene, too,” I settle for, as the oil rig shrinks away.
Three hours later and the wind’s picked up. The Merry Dormouse is rising and falling now—I have to grip the railing. The rig isn’t even a gray smear on the horizon behind us. It’s gone.
Lexi and I stand on the deck, quiet and tense. There’s so much more noise when the wind is blowing. Tarpaulin rattling, sail slapping against its ties, contents of the kitchen cupboards clashing like cymbals. I’ve had to borrow a couple of Lexi’s hair clips to hold my hair back from my face. The sea’s sparkling and creased like crumpled tinfoil. If you stare at each wave at a time, they don’t look like much at all, but the boat’s already creaking and shaking, and we’ve had to bail out the shower twice.
“We should have stayed on the rig,” Lexi says, voice small.
“This weather isn’t bad. If we weren’t so used to being on the water when it’s really still, we wouldn’t even notice it,” I say.
“You mean, if we weren’t in a rickety, leaking houseboat, then we wouldn’t even notice it,” she says dryly.
I hug her close. I feel like if I keep hold of Lexi, I can keep steady.
“We should get inside,” she says. “We need to do as much storm-proofing as we can before it gets dark.”
“Don’t say the S word.” I kiss the top of her head. “It’s just a bit windy, that’s all.”
“Do you think we might get rescued this time?” she asks after a moment, looking out at the water. The sun’s just dipped into the sea. The world’s turning grayish, still tinged with the sunset’s red. I don’t want darkness to fall.
“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”
That makes her laugh. “Because we haven’t been rescued before, in all those days on the water? Because we’re a tiny, rubbish boat on a very big sea? Because shit happens?”
Beneath the laughter, beneath the swearing, I think Lexi’s serious. There haven’t been many moments in the last eleven days when she’s genuinely lost hope. She’s a fighter, and she’s always looking ahead. It’s kept me going—she’s kept me going.
“Think of Mae,” I say quietly.
“I’m never not.”
Her tone is sharp, and I squeeze her tightly, trying to take the sting out of what I’ve said.
“We don’t give up. Because of Mae.”
“I know. I know.” She lets out a long, growling sigh. “I was so angry with Penny when I pitched up at this houseboat. But our argument seems so meaningless now. I know when people come back from extreme situations or nearly die from pneumonia or whatever, they say, hold the people you love closer, life is too short, all of that. But you can’t feel it until you’ve lived it, can you? You can’t feel how small those things are until you’ve stood here in something so fucking bad you can’t even comprehend it.”
She grips the railing as The Merry Dormouse collides clumsily with another wave, dousing our already-soaked feet on the deck.
“The truth is, I want to move out, sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. I love living with Mae, but I would also love my own life. I’ve been a bit part in Penny’s for five years now, and it’s been great, I wouldn’t change it. But I got kind of lost along the way. If you’re the sidekick for long enough, you forget how to lead your own life.”
“Look at yourself, Lexi.”
She’s magnificent. Dirt- and oil-stained, with filthy hands and her hair flying in the wind. Black boots, leather jacket, icy shark-blue eyes.
“If this is an action movie,” I tell her, “ you are definitely not the sidekick.”