Lexi
Lexi
We’re floating in the thick heat of the afternoon. There’s a very particular kind of sunshine out here, whiter than the sunshine on land; it’s mirrored back on itself in the water, and there’s nothing to block its path, so it’s just relentless.
I have a glass of red wine in my hand and I’m dancing barefoot on the roof, between the comedically shit sail we finished attaching to the flagpole with our second glass of wine, and the bicycle with its cute fake flowers woven around the handles. Zeke still has a little phone charge left—he’s kept his on airplane mode ever since we realized we were lost out here—and we’ve decided to use it listening to one of his downloaded playlists on Spotify. I just wanted some noise, something that wasn’t wind or lapping waves or a stressed-out seagull, something that wasn’t my own thoughts.
Right now we’re on “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana —to my delight, one of Zeke’s downloaded playlists is Disney’s Greatest Hits , something I find completely incongruous with his cool-guy vibe. He just smiled when I asked him about it and said, They’re iconic. It’s great songwriting. Don’t shame me. Who doesn’t want to be a Disney princess?
It’s hard to get to this spot, the flat roof on top of the bedroom, kitchen and living area, especially if you’re short like me and can’t hitch up from the deck. I have to inch my way around a narrow ledge on the side of the boat and hop up from there, but it suddenly, drunkenly struck me as strange that there’s a part of this boat where I’ve not stepped foot, so I had to try.
The song switches to “We Know the Way.” Down in the kitchen, Zeke sings along—he butchers the Samoan section, laughing at himself, but his voice is good. It’s low and gritty, soulful. I spin to his song and lift my face to the open sky. It’s the bottomless blue of true summertime.
Since that ship sailed off, I’ve been sliding deeper and deeper into apathy, and right now it feels great.
“Are you on the roof?” Zeke calls, throwing the kitchen window open.
It swings, smacking into the side of the houseboat.
“It kind of sounds like someone is tap-dancing up there.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I shout back, louder than I need to. There’s nobody nearby to think about, no reason to quiet down. Why not shout?
“Can you dance?” Zeke asks after a moment, voice drifting up from the kitchen. “I feel like you can.”
I twirl. “Oh yeah. I’m bloody brilliant. It’s like Strictly Come Dancing up here,” I say, attempting a few cha-cha steps. Penny and Mae love the show; I always watch it with one eye while scrolling through my phone. Mae likes to sit with her feet in Penny’s lap and her head in mine. The thought of her little, precious, engrossed face makes the apathy a lot harder, so I try to focus on the movements of my feet and the blank heat of the sun.
“Are you actually? Can you teach me?”
“To dance?”
“Why not?”
“I mean, I haven’t danced properly since I did classes when I was, like, thirteen. And that was a long time ago,” I say, taking another slug of red wine.
“Did you love it?”
“Yeah,” I say, then pause midstep, surprised at myself.
“Then I bet you remember how. Come on. Come down.”
His voice still holds the throaty warmth of his singing. I feel weightless, just the right amount of drunk as I hop down and inch my way back along the edge of the boat. The ledge is a foot wide; there’s a low railing along the flat roof that I can hold on to as I go, but the sea is one misstep away to my right.
I can swim, and the sea is perfectly still, so falling in would be fine. It might even be nice. It tugs at me, the temptation just to leap off into the water and swim, even though I know I wouldn’t get anywhere. The sea is absolutely everything the boat isn’t: it’s enormous, edgeless, with nothing to duck under or bump your hip on.
And that ship just left.
I’ve never felt so trapped in all my life. The water pulls at me, glimmering, wide.
“Please don’t jump?” Zeke says mildly from the deck, stretching out a hand to help me.
I snap out of it, looking away from the water. There’s a gap between the railings and where the wheelhouse cover would come down if we hadn’t sawed it off for our sail, and I slip through. My hand stays linked with Zeke’s for just a touch longer than it should. I’m wine-giddy and sun-kissed and feeling desperate; right now I really do wish he’d not declared sex forbidden . It’s one of those words that makes me contrary, especially when I’m tipsy.
Then “Let It Go” starts on the phone, and the moment I hear the opening notes, it’s like Mae has stepped onto the deck. As the piano plays out across the water, I miss her so much it makes me breathless. The soft, trusting weight of her as I carry her, sleeping, from the car. The cadence of her brightest laugh, the one that tumbles out of her. The way she says my name— Lexeeee —when I’m telling her no more telly.
I gulp in a breath, eyes flicking to Zeke, who is watching me in that thoughtful way of his, as though he’s trying to figure me out.
“I can just about slow dance,” he says. “You want to show me how it’s done?”
“I think you’re really overestimating how much I can remember from dance classes that took place in an age when we were all wearing baggy jeans the first time around.”
His lip quirks. “I think you’re capable of pretty much anything.”
He holds his hand out to me. I take it. He settles the other lightly on my waist, and we begin to dance, circling in the center of the little triangular deck as though we’re on the dance floor at a wedding. At first it feels ridiculous, but by the time we hit the chorus, I’m resting my head against his shoulder, eyes pricking with tears, gripping his hand tightly. The floor moves beneath us, but I’m used to it now, that ebb and bob, the knowledge that the sea is always so, so close.
“Why did you stop dancing?” he asks quietly.
“God, I don’t know, it was decades ago,” I say, but the moment it comes out of my mouth, I do know. Dad was long gone. Money was tighter than ever. The pub was too quiet. Penny loved her football lessons, and I knew Mum paid for them, so something had to give.
As the last line of “Let It Go” plays out, I tilt my head to look up at him. His hazy maple-syrup eyes; the faint impression of dimples; the sensitive line of his lip, reddened by the wine. I know if I kissed him, I’d taste the merlot already on my tongue.
It takes me a moment to realize the song has shifted to “A Whole New World.”
“I actually did learn a routine to this song,” I say. “It was the first one we did at the class.” I’d made Penny practice with me in the pub garden, cheered on by the summer tourists with their spritzers and sun hats.
Zeke smiles. “Yeah? Show me.”
I snort. “It was very…”
I step back and fling my arms in the air, lifting my face dramatically to the sun.
Zeke copies me, ringlets flying, the tips of his fingers brushing my arm as he lifts his hands to the sky and bends his back. I press my lips together, and then, because I’m drunk, and because right now nothing seems to matter much, I start dancing.
The teacher called this modern dance , but I don’t know if it quite fits in any category—it’s just the sort of solo a child would perform in the living room. She pitched it perfectly, hence the fact that I seem to remember it two decades on. There’s not a lot of footwork and there is a lot of arm sweeping. At one point I have to take three little steps backward, and go thwack into the steering wheel; Zeke reaches out to steady me, his eyes bright and laughing, and I don’t even stop to wonder if he’s laughing at me or with me.
I barely falter—it all just comes back to me, almost like it’s skipped my brain altogether and the memory has stayed in my body. Just as I reach the finale, I remember how Penny and I adapted it that summer, making it a two-person performance.
“Catch me and lift me up!” I say, grabbing Zeke’s shoulders and hopping.
He cottons on fast. He grips me around the waist and lifts me as I push off his shoulders. I am a lot bigger than I was when I last did this, and have considerably less core strength, but thankfully Zeke is a much better dance partner than eight-year-old Penny. He’s holding me up as I tentatively stretch my arms out to either side, one of my feet popped in full Mia–in– Princess Diaries style, and we’re wobbling, teetering here on the deck, already starting to laugh. The sun is in my face and my heart is pounding—this is the first time I’ve raised my heart rate with something other than terror since we left dry land.
I look down at his face, tilted up to mine. He’s smiling, those crossed teeth showing, his eyes narrowed against the sun’s glare; he looks gorgeous. As he lowers me to the deck, I feel every inch of our bodies touching. His eyes grow warmer, smile subsiding to the crooked one that draws a dimple in his left cheek. His chest is rising and falling, his curls mussed.
Then he drops his grip on my waist, reaching for the phone on the shelf above the steering wheel and hitting replay on “A Whole New World.”
“OK,” he says, “so step one is…”
He starts dancing.
I’m still out of breath, and he catches me completely by surprise. I laugh as he tries to mimic my performance, complete with pointed toes, expressive hair flicks and a move that takes him dangerously close to hurling himself into the sea.
“Careful!”
He grips the railing, bent over, laughing.
“What’s next?” he asks. “How am I doing?”
“You’re a natural. It’s the shimmy,” I tell him, demonstrating, and then wincing slightly—this move is a bit different now that I’m a fully grown woman.
I think I catch a flicker of heat in his eyes as he watches me dance, but he smiles it away and starts shimmying right back at me.
“No, oh my God, what are your hips doing?” I ask.
“I don’t know, what are my hips doing?”
“They’re meant to just…They don’t really get involved,” I say.
Zeke’s whole body wiggles side to side, as if he’s an overexcited puppy wagging its tail. I am not sure how, but even his knees are shimmying. I laugh so much I snort, which makes him laugh more, which makes his dancing even more shambolic.
“Just stop waggling so much!” I say, wiping tears from my cheeks. “You’re—oh my God, no, why is your bum so…” I copy him, sticking my bum out behind me.
“My bum is just where it wants to be, thank you,” he says, though he does try to pull it in a bit.
When I first saw this man lounging in his armchair in The Anchor, I never, ever imagined he would dance like this.
“There you go, you look less like you’re pretending to be a chicken now, this is good!” I say, reaching for his hips. “Now just…stop. With these. The hips need to be used sparingly. Like…” I try to think of an analogy that’ll work for Zeke. “Like salt.”
“I’m lost,” Zeke says. “Are you saying I dance like oversalted chicken?”
I tighten my grip on his hips, the black leather of his belt digging into my palms. He stills for a moment, holding on to the railing on either side, looking me in the eyes. He’s bright-faced and breathless and we’re barely a foot apart. All of a sudden, I want to kiss him—not one of those fierce, heat-seeking kisses from that night in Gilmouth, but a kiss with eyes open, where you’re still half laughing, where you don’t want to stop looking at each other for even a moment.
He lets out an unsteady breath, and then holds out a hand for me. I assume we’re going to dance again—the music is sliding from “A Whole New World” to “Go the Distance”—but instead, he tugs me inside the boat. It’s cooler in here, and a little stuffy. I can smell washing-up liquid from Zeke cleaning the barbecue and plates with a bucket of seawater, and there’s dampness in the air. Probably just the sea leaching in from somewhere, no big deal.
The door slams behind us.
“Where are we going?”
“Cocktails. My hips are a lot better after a negroni,” Zeke says, with a tiny smile, heading for the kitchen.
He fiddles with one of his newly storm-proofed cupboards. Earlier today, he fixed them all closed by looping a string around each handle— storm prep , he said, which made my stomach turn over. But now he’s tipsy and it’s taking him forever to undo them.
“Fuck’s sake,” he says, but he’s still half dancing to the Disney song playing from the phone out on the deck, swaying his head back and forth, foot tapping. “That’s your influence, you know. The swearing,” he says over his shoulder.
“Yes, I’m sure you were all ‘dangs’ and ‘dashes’ before you met me,” I say dryly, but I’m remembering what he said when we were rescuing Eugene: You swear a lot. Why do I like that so much?
The string comes loose. I watch as Zeke pulls out all the drinks I picked up in Tesco, and feel a sobering twinge of nerves as I head-count the bottles: half a liter of rum, half a liter of gin, one liter of soda water, two liters of tonic…
“We shouldn’t be wasting all this stuff,” I say.
“What, the gin?” Zeke says, voice warm. “Here, look, this is going off anyway,” he says, handing me a packet of cut mint from the fridge.
I bought this to make myself mojitos. It was juvenile, really: mojitos are Penny’s favorite, and she’s always begging me to make them for her—apparently mine are better than hers. I’m not sure when I imagined I would make myself a solo mojito. Maybe by the time I went to Tesco I already knew that after a day or two alone on the houseboat I would come to my senses and message Penny. I’m sorry I walked out like that. You didn’t really want to kick me out, right? I would have said. You’ve got to give Penny an opening to apologize—she gets herself stuck in corners otherwise, digging her heels in because she’s too ashamed to admit she made a mistake.
The mint leaves are turning dark and limp against the plastic. I guess there’s no harm in using these, and it’s not like rum is a particular staple of survival. I grab a knife from the drawer and break open the packet. Standing here in the kitchen with Disney tunes playing and the crisp, artificial feel of supermarket packaging in my hands, I can almost pretend I’m in the real world. I’m still warm from the dancing; I feel better than I have in days. Maybe longer.
“Hey, is that how you chop?” Zeke says after a while, nudging me.
“No, I’m just pretending for the live studio audience.”
I catch his smile in my peripheral vision, my gaze fixed on the mint leaves spread out on the counter.
“You know…if you keep your finger across the back of the knife like that it’ll make your hand cramp up faster. If you just…”
It happens so fast, so easily. The houseboat is barely moving, but still, the floor is always shifting underneath us, enough to throw you a touch off balance if you’re not ready for it. We’re drunk. And the knife is one of Zeke’s chef’s ones—it’s sharp.
I turn toward him to tell him off for mansplaining just as he moves toward me to guide my hand on the knife. Its tip slices clean through his T-shirt. I feel it cut the skin underneath as easily as if it were moving through warm butter.
For a moment we freeze, both silent, as the wound begins to lazily drool blood from the gaping slit in Zeke’s green T-shirt.
“No,” I say, more disbelief than denial. “I…”
Zeke claps a hand to the wound and then lets out a raw ah of pain. The blood seeps between his fingers, a vibrant, childish red. His T-shirt is already darkened and wet. I look up and meet his frightened eyes.
“We need to…” I don’t know what to say. What we need to do is ring 999. I’ve just sliced his midriff open. But there’s no 999, no phone at all. There’s just me and Zeke. “Stop the bleeding,” I manage. “Can you—can you walk? Bathroom?”
I slide the door open—it jars and catches, and I swear under my breath as I shove it back. Zeke steps through behind me, bent over himself, as though he has a stitch. I scrabble for the first aid kit and unzip it after three tries, my careful inventory forgotten—I haven’t a clue what we’ve got in here, or even what I’m looking for. As I dither over plasters and little tubes of cream, fear singing through me, Zeke grabs his towel from the rail and presses it against his stomach, then lowers himself to sit on the lid of the toilet.
“Yes,” I say, meeting his eyes fleetingly in the mirror above the sink, and then looking away. “You should…Yeah. Sit down.”
“I’m OK, Lexi,” Zeke says, voice labored.
I look down at my shaking hands and realize I’ve not put the knife down yet. I drop it in horror, and it clatters into the sink, leaving a thin streak of Zeke’s blood against the bowl.
“Honestly, I’m OK.”
“I’m so sorry,” I breathe, bracing myself against the sink. “What the fuck were we doing, drinking all that alcohol?”
I’m still drunk; my thoughts won’t seem to come into line. What do we do? What do we do?
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as it looks. It doesn’t even really hurt,” Zeke says, moving his legs gingerly. His foot brushes mine. “Should we wash it? Maybe with seawater—would that stop it getting infected? Or is that stupid?”
The word infected passes through me like it’s made of steel. You need antibiotics if a cut gets infected. We’ve only got a tiny first aid kit, plasters, one out-of-date tube of antiseptic cream.
“I don’t know,” I say, scrubbing at my face to try to sober myself up. I stare at my reflection in the mirror—I look awful. Pale and red-eyed, my hair desperately in need of a wash. “Seawater has salt in it, which is good for infection, but it’s also got bacteria in it, too, right?”
I look down at the miniature first aid kit in the sink and pull out a tube of Savlon. Its use-by date says it expired in 2020. I chew the inside of my cheek, trying to work out the relative risks. How bad can antiseptic cream go? Will it just be less effective, or does it go nasty?
“The alcohol,” Zeke says suddenly. “The gin, and the rum. Alcohol sterilizes stuff, right?”
“Yes!” I’m already heading for the cupboard, abandoning the Savlon in the sink.
The door to the drinks cupboard is still hanging open. I present the two bottles to Zeke, who stares at them, blank-faced with shock.
“The rum?” I say, when he says nothing. “I’m not sure you want a load of fragrant botanicals in there.”
He takes the rum, breaking the seal with a grimace.
“Do I just…chuck it on?” he says, lifting up the towel slightly, averting his own gaze from his stomach.
“Yeah, I think so?”
It occurs to me that it might hurt, but before I can warn him, he’s done it, and he screams between his teeth, hunching over himself. His pain is so audible I can almost feel it.
“Oh my God,” I say, pressing my hands to my face.
“It’s OK, it’s OK.” His breathing is labored. “The burn’s easing off already.”
I turn back to the sink. I can hardly bear to look at him. I did this. Me, waving a razor-sharp knife around when I’ve been drinking red wine since lunch. It’s so irresponsible it takes my breath away.
“Lexi, will you just stop for a second?”
I’m fumbling around with the Savlon again, trying to open the jammed, dried-up tube. The lid comes off and flies out of my hands, skittering off toward the base of the toilet.
“It’s OK. The alcohol just hurt, that’s all. It’s not so bad now. It’s only a cut. Look.”
“I don’t want to,” I say, but my eyes are drawn to him in the mirror as he lifts the towel away from his stomach.
I turn. His T-shirt is bloodstained from the ribs down, a solid, unpleasant shade of brown. He lifts the fabric to reveal the skin beneath, shifting his weight with a wince, and the blood runs fresh as he moves, another quick, slick gulp of dark red. The wound is stretched wide, grotesque and meaty, as broad as a smiling mouth.
“Hmm. When I imagined doing this,” Zeke says, “I sort of thought you’d be able to see less of my insides.”
I can hear the effort it’s taking him to keep his voice light.
“Oh, God,” I say, turning my face away. “That’s not just a cut. Put the towel back on, Zeke, you need to apply pressure.”
He does as he’s told and stays quiet, slumped there, head bowed as he looks down at the darkening towel. How much blood can he lose? How much has he already lost?
“Please don’t feel bad, Lexi. None of this is your fault, OK? I said we should make cocktails even though we were drunk and…you know…on a boat. Lexi—are you OK?”
“Stop being so understanding.” I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I can smell blood, tinny and frightening. “I’m fine. I just feel…” Awful, awful, awful.
“You aren’t responsible for this. For me. Lexi, look at me.”
I meet his gaze. He’s steadier now, not so afraid, not so young-looking, but I can see the pain there. As the adrenaline eases, it’ll start to get worse.
“Painkillers,” I say, swiveling back to the first aid kit. “We’ve got ibuprofen, paracetamol. You should have both. But maybe not at the same time, we should space it out…”
“I’ll just have some paracetamol,” he says. “We shouldn’t…We don’t want to get through the medicine too fast.”
He’s right. These small calculations are so difficult when we have no idea how long we’ll be out here—how much do we eat, drink, use, save up?
I fetch him a glass of water to take the tablets. He knocks them back with a wince, and I wince, too.
“How long should it take for the bleeding to stop?” he asks. His voice is level. The tone of a man telling himself to remain calm.
“I have no idea. I don’t know about any of this stuff, Zeke. I did a basic first aid course about ten years ago.”
“I’ve done some as part of a kitchen safety course,” Zeke says. “But a lot of that was about how to prevent this stuff. Like, don’t cut on an unstable surface. Such as a boat, I guess.”
I turn to face him, leaning back against the sink. It’s so cramped in here that his feet are framing mine, his knees spread so I can stand between them. The shower curtain tickles my elbow. My heart is still racing.
“I do remember learning what it’ll look like if it gets infected, though,” he says, swallowing with difficulty. “It’ll get red and raised, with little lines running off it, maybe.”
“OK. OK. So we know what to look for.”
“And then what?” Zeke says, glancing aside.
“Should we…” I point to the Savlon, abandoned next to our toothbrushes on the edge of the sink. It seems a bit ridiculous in the face of his wound, like considering applying Polyfilla to a hole made by a wrecking ball.
“I don’t really want to move the towel again,” Zeke says, almost apologetically.
“No. Yeah. OK.”
So we stay where we are. Zeke keeps pressure on the wound. I stand with him, my thoughts wine-fogged and slow with panic. Minutes pass. The towel turns darker. It’s been perhaps twenty, twenty-five minutes since I casually sliced his midriff open with a kitchen knife, and the world feels like a completely different place.
After a while, Zeke eases his hand from the towel and shakes it out at the wrist, breathing heavily through his nose. We wait. I stare at the bloodstained fabric.
“I feel like we need a game plan that isn’t just me sitting on this toilet,” Zeke says, moving to stand.
I open my mouth, but to my surprise, he’s not waiting for me to come up with something.
“If you put that green blanket over the bed, I can prop myself there,” he says. “Less strain if my feet are up, and we can wash the blanket more easily than the sheets if I, like…bleed everywhere.”
“Right! Yes. Good idea.”
I hover for a moment, wondering if he needs my help to walk, but he grips the doorframe and then takes a few unsteady, short steps to get himself to the kitchen counter. I move past him into the bedroom, grabbing the green blanket from the end of the bed.
We get him settled back on the pillows. I end up lying beside him, hands on my belly, staring up at the wood-paneled ceiling. When I close my eyes, the skylight leaves its rectangle there, glowing black. We’ve never been in this bed together before—we’ve always taken it in turns. Well, except for the first night.
“It’s wide,” Zeke says, his voice strained. I glance over, then down to the towel. He’s feeling around underneath it; his fingers come back shining with new blood. “It’s sort of stretched open? I don’t know if…I feel like a cut like this, at home, it would need stitches.”
At home, we would be in A&E right now. He’d probably be bandaged up already, just waiting for a doctor to be free to suture him. We wouldn’t think twice about the painkillers he’d pop on the drive to the hospital.
“Do we have a needle and thread?” Zeke asks.
“Oh my God,” I say, lifting a hand to my face.
“It’s OK. I’m sure I can do it myself,” he says, raising his head to look down at himself. “Do we have anything like that? A needle?”
“There’s actually a mini sewing kit in my bag,” I say. “One of those hotel ones.” From a stay in the New Forest for a friend’s wedding.
“OK. Well…We’ll wait awhile. Maybe it will look better in a bit,” Zeke says.
His voice sounds strained, and I look at him closely, tracing his profile on the pillow. He’s sweating and drawn. Maybe that’s the infection setting in, the bacteria already zipping through his bloodstream.
It is totally possible that Zeke will die. Blood loss, infection—without modern medicine, those things kill you.
I have been so afraid out here on this houseboat, but I don’t think—until now—I have truly understood the danger we’re in. It’s not just the sea, the possibility of running out of food…it’s everything. Anything. The tiny dangers we encounter every day aren’t tiny here. Splinters, snagged nails, a bout of food poisoning: any one of those could feasibly kill us.
I watch as Zeke swallows, and I am hit with a sudden, searing pang of emotion. It’s not love, obviously—I barely know the man. Of course it isn’t love. But it’s akin to it: fiery, low, sweet. Somewhere between desire and grief, as bitter and strong as the way I feel for Mae.
“You’ll be OK,” I say, and I reach across to grab his hand. “I’ll wait with you.”