“I’m a right bloody monkeypuzzle tree for you, aren’t I?”
“Is that what you think?” she asked.
“What I think,” I said, “is that I hate it when bloody shrinks ask me what I think. My father’s a grease-coated crook, my mother did a bolt, my brother’s a prick, my sister’s worse, and my wife has left me and married a bloody MP. But I’m not here for any of that, Doctor. I’m here because I got a bullet in my back and the National Health Service has undertaken to put me together again. Doing that does not, repeat not, involve poking about in my doubtlessly addled brain.” I stared up at the ceiling. I’d spent nearly a year staring at that bloody ceiling. It was cream-coloured and it had a hairline crack that looked something like the silhouette of a naked woman seen from behind. At least, it looked like that to me, but I thought I’d better not say as much to Doctor Plant or else I’d be strapped on to a couch with the electrodes glued to my scalp.
“I delivered a Contessa 32 to Holland once,” I said. “Nice boats.”
“They are,” she said enthusiastically. “Tell me about your boat.” I suppose it was because she was a sailor herself that I told her.
The trick of surviving the National Torture Service is to have one dream they can’t meddle with, one thing that gives you hope, and mine was Sycorax.
“She’s called Sycorax,” I said. “Thirty-eight feet, mahogany on oak, with teak decks. Built in 1922 as a gaff-rigged ketch. She was built for a rich man, so no expense was spared. Her usual rig is jib, staysail, main, topsail and mizzen; all heavy cotton. She’s got brass scuttles, gimballed oil-lamps in the cabin.” My eyes were closed again. “And the prettiest lines this side of paradise. She’s dark blue, with white sails. She’s got a long keel, is built like a Sherman tank, and can be as cantankerous as the bloody witch she’s named after.” I smiled, remembering Sycorax’s stiffness in a freshening wind.
“The witch Sycorax.” Doctor Plant frowned with the effort of placing the name. “From Shakespeare?”
“From The Tempest. Sycorax was Caliban’s mother and she imprisoned her enemies in timber. It’s a joke, you see, because a timber boat imprisons you with debts.”
Doctor Plant offered a dutiful smile. “I hope you’ve had her ashore since you’ve been in here?”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t given time to take her out of the water, but she’s sheathed in copper and berthed on a private wharf. She’s been battered about a bit, but I can repair her.”
“You’re a carpenter?” There was a touch of surprise in her voice.
I rolled my head to look at her. “Just because I was an Army officer, Doctor Plant, doesn’t mean I’m totally bloody useless.”
“You’re good at carpentry?” she insisted.
I held up my hands that were calloused from the exercises I did, but, though the callouses were hard, the fingertips were white and soft. “I used to be. And I was a good mechanic.”
“So you see yourself as a practical man, do you?” she asked with the professional inflection.
“You’re meddling again,” I warned her. “You’ve come here to sing Doctor Maitland’s song. Get a skill, Nick. Learn to be an account-ant or a computer programmer. Talk to the newspapers, Nick. They’ll pay you for the interview and you can buy a nice little electrically-driven wheelchair with the cash. In short, give up, Nick, surrender.
But if I’d wanted to do that, Doctor, I’d have stayed in the Army.
They offered me a desk job.”
She stood and went to the window. A cold wind drove spits of winter rain against the glass. “You’re a very stubborn man, Mr Sandman.”
“It’s true.”
“But how will your stubbornness cope when you discover that you can’t walk?” She turned from the window with a quizzical look on her motherly face. “When you discover that you’ll never sail your Sycorax again?”
“Next year”—I ignored her blunt questions—“I’m going to take her south. I’m going to New Zealand. There’s no particular reason for New Zealand, so don’t ask.” At least, there was no particular reason I could think of. I knew no one in New Zealand, had never been there, but somehow the place had become my Promised Land.
I knew they played good rugby and cricket, had splendid sailing waters, and it seemed like a place where an honest man could spend honest days unencumbered by the pomposities of self-important fools. Doubtless, if I ever reached New Zealand, I would discover I’d deceived myself, but that disappointment could wait till my boat made its far landfall. “I’ll sail to the Azores first,” I went on dreamily,
“then across to Barbados, south to Panama, across to the Marque-sas…”
“Not round the Horn?” Doctor Plant interrupted sharply.
I gave her a warning look. “More meddling?”
“It isn’t an unfair question.”
“You think I don’t want to go to the South Atlantic again?” She paused. “That thought did cross my mind, yes.”
“I don’t have nightmares, Doctor, only dreams.” That wasn’t true.
I still woke up shivering and thinking of an island in the South Atlantic, but that was my business, not hers.
Doctor Plant smiled. “Dreams can come true, Nick.”
“Don’t patronize me, Doctor.”
She laughed and suddenly sounded much more like a sailor than a psychiatrist. “You really are a stubborn bastard, aren’t you?” I was, and two weeks later, though I told no one, I managed to hobble, hop and shuffle as far as the window. It took three minutes, much pain, and my breath was rasping like glasspaper in my throat when I finally clutched the sill and rested my forehead against the cold glass. It was a cloudless winter night and there was a full moon over the hospital grounds where the bare trees were frosting black and silver. A car turned a corner in the neighbouring housing estate and its headlights dazzled me for an instant, then were gone. When my night vision returned I searched for Aldebaran among the stars.
There had been a time when I would bring that far sun sweetly down to the dawn’s horizon, mastering it with the miracle of a sextant’s mirror. Now I was a shivering cripple, but somewhere far to the west and south my boat waited. She would be plucking at her warps, rubbing her rope fenders against the stone quay, and waiting, like me, to be released to the long long winds under Aldebaran’s cold light.
Because one day, whatever the bloody doctors said, Sycorax would take me to New Zealand. Just the two of us in great waters, sailing south, and free.
PART ONE
I walked out of the hospital fourteen months later.
I knew Doctor Maitland would have told the press that I was leaving, so I discharged myself two days early. I didn’t want any fuss. I just wanted to get back to Devon and walk into the pub and pretend I’d been away for a week or two, nothing more.
So I limped down the hospital drive and told myself that the pain in my back was bearable, and that the hobbling walk was not too grotesque. I caught a bus at the hospital gate, then a train to Totnes, and another bus that twisted its way into the steep river-cut hills of the South Hams. It was winter’s end and there were snowdrops in the hedgerows. I wanted to cry, which was why I’d told no one that I was coming home, for I had known just how glad I would be to see the hills of Devon.
I asked the bus-driver to drop me at the top of Ferry Lane. He watched me limp down the vehicle’s steps and heard me gasp with the effort of the last, deep drop to the road. “Are you all right, mate?”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just want to walk.”
The door hissed shut and the bus grumbled away towards the village while I went haltingly down the lane which led to the old ferry slip. From there I would be able to stare across the river at Sycorax.