Debatable Land Read Free

After five different men had checked him out over two afternoons, he met Logan, who took him on.
    Sandro had, instead of the patriotism he might have, had not his mother divided and his father made repulsive such an idea, a high romantic regard for sailing boats. He loved them and learnt quickly the mood of each boat he lived and worked on. Ardent Spirit , for instance, had a list to port before certain winds and under certain combinations of canvas. At her best, she sailed more perfectly, more nearly silently, than any boat he had been on. Her ornamental interior he noticed and did not mind, while Nick saw it and was irritated somewhat at details that he felt were pointless enough on land. Sandro forgave the vessel’s fine innards and her well-made solidity, even the sofa cover patterned with stylised marine knots, the shelves battened to measure for books, the tantalus socketed in its cupboard, the rotating captain’s chair plugged with buttons, before a chart table big enough, really, to eat off, to sleep on.
    And it was so that above, on deck, such detail lost the note of frivolity although it was incidentally elegant, being entirely bent on purpose and maintained at a level that might be called groomed. Each rope, for fear of catching and holding and thus, at such great weights of sail, tearing off a hand or foot, was coiled invariably, discreetly, concentrically, paid down inside itself – even if it had to be so in exactly the same manner again two minutes later. Winch handles were stowed as though they were sharp knives. The deck was smooth and white and close-set with only the regular golden freckle of brass screws to hold it. Towards the bow the hardly visible curve of the deck took the eye like the wing of a hovering bird as its two sides approached one another precisely, minutely, the tessellation of the pale wood meeting without demarcation.
    Sandro shared his cabin with Gabriel Shepherd, whom Logan had taken on as cook. She was tactful about being female. So far the only disturbance she had caused him was by her occasional mutterings into a small tape recorder. She was describing the journey to her mother, to whom she regularly sent these tapes. Sandro listened from the lower bunk (he had offered Gabriel the choice of whether to sleep above or below; embarrassment must not even commence in so confined a space or it spreads more treacherously than a silent fart) as she spoke rather shyly into her machine, whose absence of response in the silence sometimes seemed a bit rude. Often, he was struck by how different was Gabriel’s account of things from any he might have given, was giving, he supposed, in a more cryptic way, in what he told Gabriel was his diary but what was in fact the long letter to his mother that he stopped writing only to post and then at once resumed.
    Gabriel was an English girl, come to try out the world, Sandro supposed, before going home to an English man. She spoke in the old-fashioned way and wore a nightgown, under which she undressed, even when the watch system meant her sleeping times came during the day. Nonetheless, although she was slight, Gabriel was tough; she could crack walnuts in her palms and go up in the bosun’s chair’s spinning and creaking harness, where she’d hang at the top of the mast doing chores sixty feet up at a tilt as though she was taking cobwebs off the moon with a feather duster for fun. Sandro listened, not knowing that he did so, for any mention of himself in Gabriel’s tapes. He knew the backs of her legs and her feet’s soles well from lying exhausted in his bunk below hers. Both of them knew the other’s unthinking habits since they had seen one another in states of extreme exhaustion usually shared only by pairs of people who are coupled, and are able only to brush tired shorthand kisses on to one another at the beginning or end of shifts with work or sleepless infant.
     
    It was Gabriel’s Englishness, in a way, that had brought out the ill