The final count-down?

With just a week to go for the Parole Board to decide whether I am civilised enough to go Out There again, to mingle in the sanctity of society, I felt it could be beneficial to recall experiences that perhaps match the horror show of the last eight years.


I applied the notion in what the Open University terms life-writing - biography - in one of the last assignments before I learn if I graduate in English Literature.

Worse things happen at sea, they say
The South Atlantic torrented into the main cabin as if flung from a new trebuchet and as tellingly. The roar in that echoey space hurt, felt loud enough to cause injury, threatening more than haemorrhaging eardrums and deafness. It chorused discordantly that we were done for: no escape, no rescue, no hope, a palindrome of an out-of-tune tune, for the message came the same from any angle. And that left only supernatural help to pray for. Perhaps an airliner might whoosh low down through clouds thick as curtains, packed with pelagic bird spotters, perhaps a naval submarine quite lost might periscope to seek directions, perhaps a friendly UFO will appear and report us to NASA or the CIA. The charts revealed the clear message. Yes, I had navigated us very neatly - the line of the track was straight enough to please a Roman roadmaker - and we were just about equidistant between South America and Africa, straddling a stretched mountain chain of the dark deep, and a little to the north-west of Tristan.

Had we braved slightly more robust conditions a whisker to the southward, our threatened demise might have occurred at the garden gate of that perpendicular British satellite and within reach of rescue. The impeccable DRs and sun-fixes and GPS confirmations showed that we had gambled with safety just as we gambled for safety. To try to bypass the worst weather of the Roaring Forties, I navigated us through what could be termed, comparatively, moderate latitudes.

Coming this way meant kinder winds, manageable waves, and some warm sun, but no ships. When everything is ship shape, an absence of ships is wholly to be desired. But if things go wrong - why would they go wrong, optimism had said up to a quarter of a league ago - no ships meant no rescue. And here we were adrift where ships don’t voyage. A sickly chromatic dawn probed the morning’s weighty cloud and confirmed our discomfort. Until now, since abandoning the yacht, we suffered just the feel of the new sensations of our new transport. We felt the exhaustion that accompanies the most desperate of dramas, that intense tiredness that makes an impossible effort of everything no matter how vital or trivial. Of course, there could be no walking on this flimsy floor, but it dragged at your heels like Robinson Crusoe felt in a dream where terror simply won’t let you run, even though to move any slower is to woo painful death.

In the stricken yacht, while there were things to do, we were overacting furnaces of fire, performing everything with enthusiasm - performing those distress calls, committing the contents of the current chart to memory, collecting clothing and food, preparing the raft, shrugging bravely over the equipment and materials and parts of our present life about to vanish into the past and accompany the hulk zig-zagging far down into the nightbound deep. But here boarded and resident on the raft, there was little to do but suffer. And the look of our weary expressions confirmed that we were uncertainly suffering.

And how could it be otherwise? The irreconcilable floor was flimsy and frozen and wore the wetness of a new corpse. Wherever you leant, the floor clung to bare skin yet sagged underneath, and in the indent of the sagging, the wetness pooled. That meant as we sat hunched over, our bottoms pushed the floor down and we were dumped in the damp. If the sea should get up, if it should rain, if we should develop a leak, what would be the situation then, we could hardly help but question ourselves silently, knowing all the time that only hopeless optimism used the word ‘if’. The correct term was ‘when’. And then when we attempted to sleep, when we were lying down stretched out as much as the raft allowed, we would be lying in water. It did not make for encouraging thoughts in the dark of a fairly peaceful night.

In the new cruel light of dawn, these were dangerous fears surfacing, or descending, as worrying even terrorising notions. In the dark, when you can’t see what you are up against, it’s easier to be stoical and even a little bit brave. However, in the olivine probing light of our first dawn, one felt overpowered by all the things that were wrong, even by the few things that were right, like being undrowned and able to experience pain and, worse than worst, anticipate what was to come. Fortunately, given our mood, we had not dwelt much on the likelihood of famished marauders summoned by spilt blood. That was a surprise in store.

The few hours of darkness that allowed us to journey from novice to unhappy graduation had gradually ended. Now there was no disguising the inadequate bags dumped unhappily about the tiny shell that was our home and our coffin, the few clothes half out of the unsealable bags, soggy towels waiting to perform impossible chores, scant items of food vulnerably open to the elements, mixed smells of new rubber and French chalk and the sweat of fright and fear, and the two miserable beings dumped in the middle of the muddle, perhaps trying to look brave and ready for eventualities and capable of handling all emergencies, but now in the roseate splash of dawn looking instead haggard and, with good reason, desperate and desperately unhappy. The advantages of company, of not having to hoard your misery, and being able to talk about it and through it and talk problems out, become disadvantages when nature makes its daily demands on humans. We have animal bodies that have necessary functions, which in our civilised way we don’t talk about, and between the sexes, through romance and the society’s niceties, often forget their existence. But here a man and a woman existed till death did them part in a tiny cockleshell, less than six feet across, and how were we now to deny our needs, and even more difficult, how were we to perform those necessary functions?

There was certainly no reassuring porcelain here, no muffling walls in case we might revolt each other, not even a curtained off corner, no accessories, no air freshener, not even a basin with perfumed soap. Not even soap. And added to all the amenities that did not exist to aid our upbringings, there was simply a very thin piece of material between us and the sea, and whatever might dwell there, friend or foe, and so floppy and creepy to the touch that reluctant movement across it was only possible by manoeuvring as babies manoeuvre, feet out, press heels down, pull the hams after. And around that flimsiness was the inflated rim, a large gas-filled bolster that kept out the sea - we hoped - and anything out there that might try to get in. (This didn’t need any thinking about.) There was not so much as a handy receptacle. Yet somehow we had to invent a method that allowed the relief that soon could no longer be denied. And not just once, but every day we were trapped out here, or until we perished from weather, or were consumed by something beneath us, or we succumbed slowly to the sea.

Through the doorway of our covered raft, a blue rather smooth sea dazzled as far as the eye could see - perhaps almost a mile this close to the surface. And on the surface, rocking in very slow motion the yacht waited, mesmerically and mockingly, ocean lapping the gunnels,yet suspended by something unknown from the plunge all the way two miles down to the South American Plate of the Central Atlantic Ridge. We were tethered on a long line because the tall mast and the superstructure were much more likely to be seen from afar than our tiny tinpot shelter. If someone sailed along, they might well see the yacht and recognise her Marie Celeste distress and be curious. But if the raft bounced and wombled and wallowed here on her own, they would almost run us down before they could see the gaudy orange top. Perhaps as well - though frankly she had been a bastard, disobliging, flighty sailer - I simply could not let her go without a salute, without a truly sorrowful farewell, and doubtlessly superstition was a part of it too. Perhaps she wouldn’t sink while the tethering was in place. Perhaps it would all turn out to be a catoptric caused by sea reflection.

We could pull ourselves back to the yacht one day, find her drained and dry and welcoming, and go back on board, laughing about being taken in. ‘Liz, I, well, I need to go, and there’s the yacht there. Shall we see if we can get onto her for some, well, privacy?’ ‘Good idea,’ said Liz, and hand over hand, we inched over to the doomed vessel, clambered onto the unstable deck, found she didn’t plunge beneath our weight, and in some strange human way, recovered a little dignity and purpose.

It was so good to stand on the yacht, to touch the wheel, to look at the dear old compass, to see the boom swaying a little with the mainsail firmly boused down, to listen to the melancholy cacophony of halyards frapping. Dear God, I would give my right arm for the water to evaporate, for us to have our command of a sensible if stubborn means of transport again. We’ll turn about and go back to Rio and I’ll never embrace the sea again, perhaps join a monastery, donate my remaining life to the warbling of divine praise.

A toothbrush lay waiting by the wheel. It must have fallen when I was carrying our luggage over to the raft. We were strangers, but a man and a woman after all. I’d hate to offend. And with what joy I squeezed onto the bristles some paste from a tube of Colgate lying nearby and smelled its sharp, minty reminder of home, brushed my teeth as though I were back at the wheel with a reason, and this another glorious seafaring day. But splats of toothpaste hitting the water ended the dream. They proved the calamity: there was no way on. The yacht was stopped, swaying as if drunk, semaphoring small shines of half-sunlit distress, alphabets of silver and gold, syllables of red and orange.