Dark Echo

surfaces still with the showroom sheen of newness on them. We had been at sea less than a week and were victims of catastrophe. The situation was hopeless. It was hopeless. But it was not terror that made me weep, and it was not self-pity either. It was grief for my father, believing him lost.

I ate a bowl of chicken and lentil broth in the fog at the wheel with a chunk of defrosted bread. And I drank with my meal a large measure of rum. I had brought the rum aboard myself as a sort of ironic joke, played against the traditions of the sea. But I badly needed a drink and it was warm in my belly and a comfort as the Dark Echo continued with smooth relentlessness through the water on its rogue course. The booze emboldened me, I think. I realised that I would have to confront my father. There were guns in his cabin. In his present, irrational mood, he was a danger to himself and a liability to both of us. Maybe I would be obliged to restrain him. Perhaps I would have to do that and then dump the various weapons over the side. But I could not just ignore what was going on. It was a reversal of our normal roles, but I had a duty of care to my dad. And there was an urgent practical imperative. If I could shake him out of the delusional fugue he was in, he could help me with the boat. His seamanship was more than the equal of mine. Maybe he had tampered with the auto-steer and maybe he had not. Whatever, the graveness of the situation and the rum told me that I had no choice but to confront him.

I knocked.

‘Enter.’

His cabin looked normal. There was no harsh smell of tobacco and the lamps lit the space with unambiguous clarity. I stole a glance at the guns in their cabinet. But there was no belligerence about them now. They looked like the lethal tools they undoubtedly were. But there was a neutrality about them that had been troublingly absent earlier. My father looked groomed, composed. He must have eaten, too, I thought. Certainly he had discovered the presence of mind from somewhere to shower and shave. Under us, I could feel the Dark Echo smooth on its mutinous path. If anything, the vessel was getting faster in the fog. It was inexplicable.

‘We’re on a homeward heading, Dad.’

‘I know.’

‘Why?

‘You’re a good sailor, Martin. I’ve watched you. You’re punctilious and possess no shortage of endurance.’ He smiled, but it was a flawed, conflicted smile. ‘I’ve been delighted with you. I’ve been proud of you, truth be told. But I’m no part of what the Dark Echo is doing, in answer to your unasked question. She’s doing what she’s doing. It’s no doing of mine.’

I dumped myself in the chair at his desk in front of him.

‘All our communications systems are out. Cellular, satellite phone, wireless. We don’t have sonar and email is so sporadic it’s virtually useless. The engine is completely dead. The binnacle compass is the only instrument still working consistently. That, and the emergency beacon, which no one can see anyway in the fog. We know which direction we’re going in, but we can’t pinpoint our own position. Even if we could, we can’t get on to the emergency frequencies to put out a Mayday call. We’re on our own.’

‘Do you think this fog is some sort of experimental thing we’ve blundered into?’

He smiled. ‘Are you asking me if it has a military application? I don’t think so, Martin. And neither do you. It’s a long time since the character who conjured this fog had anything to do with the military.’ He reached for the framed picture of the boat, the one he had seen originally as a child. He held it between his hands. ‘I remember very vividly the time I first saw this photograph. The volume containing it lay open on the page. It lay in a pool of sunlight on the bedside locker at which I would sit to do my homework. My mother swore she hadn’t put it there. We did not run in those days to domestic staff, Martin. And I did not take it from the shelf and put it there myself. Was it destiny, do you think? Or was it some omnipotent design, dictating my ambitions, shaping the fabric of my dreams.’

He put the picture back down. He lifted his hands to his face and rubbed at his eyes with his fingers. ‘It gets hard, after the age of forty or so.’

‘What does?’

‘You lose the resilience. You lose the dynamism. There are all sorts of ways of continuing the illusion of youth. But that’s what it becomes, son. It becomes an illusion. And it turns itself, regardless of your will, into a memory. You become tired. And fatigue makes a man vulnerable.’

I didn’t much care about what he was saying, to be honest. I was just relieved that he was sounding like my father again. It was that happy mixture of portentousness and self-pity and good sense I fondly recognised as him. But we had still the problem to confront of our ungovernable boat. I’d have called her delinquent, but she was ninety years old. There were forces aboard her, I felt, far more profound and troubling than delinquency. She felt possessed.

It was then that I noticed the mirror. The small brass-bound mirror in which I had caught Spalding’s reflection on my first terrible visit to the boat was back were I had seen it then. It had been mounted in its original place on my father’s cabin wall.

‘I need you on the deck, now, Dad. We’ve got to try to turn her about. We have to assert control over her. Either you’re the master of this vessel or you’re not. I believe you are.’

‘So I am, by God,’ he said. He thumped the table. His jaw jutted. He held my eyes steadily. He sounded as though he meant it. Had I succeeded in rekindling the pride that remained in him? It was his cherished dream, after all, that had descended into this waking nightmare. Perhaps he had remembered Monsignor Delaunay’s blessing. Whatever, with what seemed like fresh hope and newly summoned defiance, we went above.

The fog had thickened. And it seemed the Dark Echo had gathered speed. I wrestled with the wheel, but she kept heading back to the same slyly insistent course. We raised our sails to try to put about by harnessing the wind. It was what you did aboard a sailing boat. But there was no wind to harness. The sails sagged in the windless mist like shrouds. We dropped a dragging anchor, just in an attempt to slow her down, to arrest the impetus of the vessel. The anchor chain merely strained and groaned against the capstan as her speed through the still water further increased.

‘It’s as though we’re only provoking her,’ I said.

‘It’s him we’re provoking,’ my father said. He was standing beside the deck compass. ‘If we continue on this heading, in four or five days we shall reach the Irish coastline. There we will founder. Unless we can stop her, on her present course, she will either run aground or break up on the rocks off the coast of County Clare.’

I could see the boat in my mind, dashed to pieces in the boiling surf under the great, indifferent ramparts of the Cliffs of Moher. Was that to be our fate?

We stood there beside one another on the deck, mist prickling our skin, salt in our lungs, all silence except for the water trailing the stern of the seventy tons of wood and metal aboard which we were now no more than hostages. Or prisoners. Despite my father’s cryptic mention of Spalding, I did not feel that his ghost shared our voyage. I felt rather that my father and myself were the only people left in the world. And the sense of isolation and our helplessness in it was terrible.

‘I’m going below, Martin. I can do nothing here.’

‘You can do nothing there.’

‘I can get drunk,’ my father said.

I did not answer him.

‘I’m going below.’

I went below myself. I turned on the computer, but my email would neither send nor receive. So I started to write – which had become almost a compulsion with me – and, I thought, might provide more comfort for the moment than the bottle in which my father would be seeking his consolation.

I began writing this account on the evening of the day all those months ago at Bullen and Clore that my father bought the boat. I have kept at it faithfully over the days and weeks and months since then. I brought it aboard the Dark Echo on a disc. And I transferred the file to my little white laptop. Writing it, as the account grew, I’d often wondered what it was for. It seemed part diary, part chronicle and part confession. Reading it back, sometimes the tone of it seemed to me a bit pompous or hysterical. Its singular virtue was truth. Every word of what I’d written – and now continued to write – was a true account of what had taken place. And now I did at last know what its function was to be, always assuming that little bit of luck or providence required. I was not confident about this part. Luck seemed an element in desperately short supply aboard the