Sea Lord

She was settling by the bows. Her mainsail was gone and her genoa was burning into ash. Somehow the mast stayed up. I could see the liferaft container bobbing merrily and uselessly alongside the blistering hull.

The bows dropped further. Everything flammable in the cabin must have been well aflame by now; lockers, foam, bedding, papers, clothes, cooking oil, table, chart table, my money, my passport, everything in the world I owned, all now an inferno that pumped flame and smoke out of the open companionway. Sunflower suddenly lurched sideways and I feared the mast would fall on us so I kicked with my feet again and the motion pushed my head underwater.

When I surfaced again I saw she had dipped her bows under. The sea reached the hawse-hole and filled the chain locker. She sank further. I was treading water desperately. I was tiring. I was beginning to feel the pain where my legs had been burned, and the moment I began to feel it, so the pain suddenly became excruciating and I knew that the anaesthetic effect of adrenalin was wearing off. It must have been worse for Jennifer, except she was only half conscious.

The sea reached Sunflower’s forehatch which, undogged, fell open and let the water surge in. The stern swung further up so that I could see her rudder and propeller. Steam was hissing and mingling with the smoke as the fire fought the sea. The sea would win, because it always does, and slowly, slowly, I saw my boat begin her long slide down to the sea bed. She’d taken me to far, far places. We’d sailed the blood-red sea off Cape Non and hove to off the cliffs at Cape Bojador, which the old navigators had thought was the place the world ended. We’d sailed the Whitsunday Islands, and dared the pirates in the Philippines. We’d anchored in mangrove swamps in Florida, and sailed the harbours of Maine. We’d rounded the Horn twice, but we’d never sail together again for now she was sinking and it seemed as if the fire was compressed, or else the steam was superheated for the jet of vapour and flames and smoke became a solid roaring plume that was being pumped three hundred feet into the summer sky. It seemed extraordinary that one small boat could make so much filth.

Then she went. The mast-tip went under, the cockpit reared up, then, with one last puff of flame and dark smoke, Sunflower dragged herself down. Something hissed on the sea’s bubbling surface. There was a pause, then the liferaft, still tied by its rope to the sinking hull, was pulled down and out of sight. Floating burnt wreckage was all that was left; that and a dirty smear of smoke that lingered in the summer air.

Jennifer was moaning and I knew she was dying. I also knew I was tiring and that soon I would be forced to let her go and she would roll over, her mouth would fill with water and she would drown. That realisation made me angry, so I cursed her for dying. I told her she would live. I told her she would bloody well live. I told her to stop her pathetic whimpering and to start kicking with her legs. I told her she was a spoilt damned rich bloody bitch who deserved to die if she didn’t wake up and swim. I cursed her in three languages and four letters, and I might as well have saved my breath for she did not recover consciousness and I was tiring and every swear word drained another scrap of precious energy.

In the end I stopped cursing her. I remember telling her that I loved her, but then I had no more energy to talk for all my strength was needed to keep us afloat. My legs were agony, and felt like lead. More and more often the water would slop into my mouth. I would choke and spit and struggle to gain an extra inch of airspace. I held Jennifer with one arm and paddled with the other.

But I was losing the battle. The hallucinations began. I saw a boat coming to pick us up: it was a great schooner, white-hulled with a reaching bowsprit. The illusion was so exact that I could see the chain bobstay beneath the bowsprit and the gilded wood carving where her figurehead might be. Men leaned over from the bows to pluck us from the water and I reached up to catch their hands and the act of reaching up plunged me underwater and the hallucination vanished in a blow of reality as sea water choked my gullet. I struggled up and pulled Jennifer’s burned head from the water. For all I knew, she was already dead, but I would not let her go. I was crying, not out of pity, but frustration. There was no schooner. There was nothing but the sea and Sunflower’s funeral smoke and one seagull gliding past.

I saw a beach. It was very close. The beach was long and sandy, backed by low grass-covered dunes. No one was on the beach, but a shingle roof rising above the dunes promised a refuge. I swam towards the beach. The hope of safety seemed to give me a new manic energy and I muttered in Jennifer’s ear that we were going to be all right now, that all we had to do was survive the surf and I’d go to the house and find help. “We’ve reached America,” I said, because now I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from a flagpole in front of the house. The illusion was so damned real that I was even wondering how to persuade an American hospital to treat us when we didn’t have any credit cards, but then a small wave splashed my face and when I opened my eyes again the beach was gone, and the flag and the house had vanished with it and there was only the empty sea and sky. Jennifer was heavy in my arm, the sea was seeping its fatal coldness into me, and the tiredness was filling me with a great weakness.

I almost let her go, but I made myself hold on to her burned flesh. I tried to keep her head above water, but my kicking was becoming more and more feeble so that more and more water broke over my face to sting my eyes and fill my throat. I told her once more that I loved her. She neither made a sound, nor moved.

A helicopter appeared in the sky. I cursed this new hallucination because now I only wanted to die in peace. The helicopter made a huge clattering noise, disturbing me, and I swam feebly away from it in the hope of finding a place of great quiet and slow gentle dying. Again the illusion was crystal clear, even to such details as the helicopter’s shadow sweeping over us and the water churning beneath the blade’s downdraught. I saw the winchman peering down, but I fought the illusion because I dared not cling to such imaginary hopes, yet the mind persisted, and I hallucinated the rope dropping down and touching the water to discharge the helicopter’s static electricity. I cursed the dream.

A wave swamped us. I choked, but this time there was no air to breathe. I had gone underwater. I still clung to Jennifer, but now I was drowning and she was drowning with me. I opened my eyes and found peace. The water’s surface was like a sheet of waving silver above me. No helicopter disturbed that pretty sight. My pain had gone, my ears were filled with the long, hollow booming of the sea, and there was peace and gentleness and a shot-silk silver sky of coalescing wonder.

Then the great shape hammered the silver black, and it seemed that a man was in the water, huge and thrashing and intrusive, and I closed my eyes to get rid of the dream and I let Jennifer go as I drifted away to nowhere and nothing, because it was all over now; it was all over and I was finished and everything was ended.

Part Four

Ulf, of all people, bloody Ulf, was telling me that Sunflower’s mast was too high and mounted too far aft. He was saying to wake up and move the thing. I tried to tell him to shut up, but his voice droned on. You’re all right, Johnny, he said, you’re not going to die because death is just a mentally induced self- deception, and I told him to stuff his opinions and then I saw that Ulf was dressed all in white and had a black face, and I wondered how the hell he’d ever got into heaven to become a white-robed angel, and I felt a vague surprise that everyone in heaven was black, though it did seem a fairly heavenly solution to an earthly problem, then I wondered how I’d ever got permission to enter heaven myself. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.

“You’re all right now,” said the hallucination of Ulf which resolved itself into a black-bespectacled doctor who was bending over me. “Move your hand,” he said, “that’s good.”

My left ankle and calf were a mass of pain, like the time I’d been stung by a jellyfish off the Malaysian coast. I hissed and jerked as the pain struck me, then tried to explain it. “Jellyfish,” I said.

“My name’s Mortimer,” the doctor said, “Doctor Mortimer. And you’re the Earl of Stowey, yes?”

“John,” I said, “call me John.” A siren was wailing somewhere, and the sound reminded me of Jennifer’s screaming. I turned my head to see I was in a small brightly lit room and there was no sign of Jennifer. “Is she alive?”

“She’s alive,” the doctor said, but I was already responding to the drugs that were sparing me pain. I slept.

It had been the mackerel boat which saved our lives. They had seen the smoke churning up, turned back to investigate, and seen Sunflower burning. They had called the coastguard on Channel 16, who had summoned the Royal Naval Air Service. It had taken just eight minutes from the time that the skipper of