I'm on a boat...

*the third extract from my 'wip'novel (context below).

Photo credit: me! This is 1970s ‘colour therapy’ lamp owned by my family.

He was twenty-five years, ex-Navy and a captain, he referred to himself as retired but still worked as a park ranger four days a week. He would say ‘this is the life’ once everyday and play Midnight Oil every time they docked. 

‘This is proper Australian Naval practice,’ he said.

‘Midnight Oil are fucking shit,’ said Justin. When the captain moved around the deck she learned to be very still.

‘Better,’ the captain said, ‘otherwise you’re just a moving target.’ She made herself rigid. Well done, you’re a plank of wood! Said Le Petit Gazelle the small fantastical beast that lived inside her chest. 

She imagined herself a secretly mutinous member of captain step-father’s crew, in cahoots with Justin, plotting together she wasn’t sure quite what but plotting all the same. Soft-spoken with calm, slow mannerisms Justin at first had seemed just as placid and malleable as Finleh. But was Lorna realised, after a few days in his company, entirely different. Charged by the idea of his own difference and superiority to everyone around him. The seat on the rowboat was small but not small enough to have justified her leaning into him that much; she felt the hard surface of his bicep through both their coats.

After ten days aboard, her muscles had started to change. The husband explained that this was because unconsciously on a boat you are continually tensing to keep yourself upright. The mother, a stone overweight, laughed and said that she hoped to drop a dress size simply by being at sea, even if she was eating mountains of Gruyere, crackers, chutney.

One day they docked at Port Izaak and left what Lorna had come to think of as ‘the adults’ on the boat, the three of them spent the afternoon walking around prison ruins. The mother, the husband, their friends, drank G and T’s aboard Solar Living, while on shore they read facts about overcrowding and squalor, incredible tales of murderers allowed inside the homes of prison guards, serving their jailor’s dinner. They found what appeared to be the only pub on the island and played the pokies till dark. The following day the mother and the husband went for more drinks on their friend’s nearby catamaran and the three of them stayed aboard. Justin on the bow tying sailor knots into his climbing ropes, Finleh sun-bathing, Lorna reading. The water was almost black, obsidian, gleaming, not the bright-blue she had expected. She announced that she would be going in to her husband, his brother. Her feet pushed into the cool metal of the steps, her front to the boat, her back to the water. She plunged. A flush of tingles, feet and arms wildly treading water, echoed claps of the mother, husband and their friends from the neighbouring deck. The water piercing. Within two circles of the boat she had lost all strength in her arms and couldn’t pull herself up the ladder. Finleh and Justin took a forearm each and yanked her up the metal railings, suspended in the air for a moment, like the fish from days before. She collapsed onto the deck, high from the cold, rolled about in hysterical laughter. 

 ‘What are you doing?’ Finleh said.

They had disembarked a day before her twenty-fifth birthday.

‘Quarter life crisis time!’ She said. Her birthday fell in the unfortunate gap between Christmas and New Years day, the interim period that she and her friends referred to as ‘the gooch’.

In the morning he wished her a Happy Birthday and gave her a bad-taste joke card that read the shops here are shit so I’ll get you something in the city. Then the day began as the others, eating muesli at the Formica breakfast bar of his father’s home, the house was flimsy and seemed to be built of MDF; the inside stunk of newly laid carpet chemicals, the muesli stuck in her gums and she felt her face crumpling. 

You brat, said Le Petit Gazelle. 

Finleh seeing the crumpling had disappeared in his father’s Ute and returned with a bottle of pink cava and some blueberries. He placed three berries in the bottom of a flute, filled it and handed her a glass. Bubbles popped on the surface and they clinked.

 ‘HBD! Sorry it’s not exciting here.’ 

*the protagonist is called Lorna, ‘the Captain’ is her step-father-in-law, her husband is called Finleh, her brother-in-law is called Justin. At this part of the story she is on her yacht with her in-laws, who she has very recently met, they are cruising around the coastline of Tasmania, Australia.

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The first extract of this ‘work in progress’ novel is here and the second is here. For something completely different you may enjoy this ‘Fish out of Water’ non-fiction series of my Substack here.

Thank you very much for reading and for some lovely recent comments from subscriber friends, I appreciate it.

Emma x o x o