Solitude

A short story published by Everything With Words in 2021 in an anthology Same, Same, but Different

SOLITUDE

I soon hit northerly winds for what I knew would be a long beat to windward to get to Suez at the top of the Red Sea. The small back-up autopilot had failed around the Gate of Tears, so now I was down to helming the boat by hand to get to places. With the arrival of the northerlies I could tie off the helm and put a bungee cord on the lee side to take the kick out of coming off a wave so Orion steered herself to windward, just as she had done going eastwards across the Indian Ocean. A small relief though a blessed one.

I tacked back and forth across the Red Sea towards Saudi Arabia or back towards the Sudanese coast. The gains were small, around 60 to 70 miles made good a day, but gains they were as we inched up the chart of the Red Sea. My cooking deteriorated to tomato-based pasta sauces and since I was the only one cooking, I wasn't too miffed about the monotonous diet. Still, I remembered the food in India and the far east – all turmeric and cardamom seeds and pilaf that was fluffy and spiced with something I could never quite put my finger on.

Mussa had joined me in Cochin on the bottom of India. A friend of more than twenty-five years, in the last decade he had subsided into an alcoholic mess. I wanted to resurrect the old Mussa, a strange missionary impulse on my part that would end in tragedy and leave a curse on my soul on the wide-open sea. I suggested he join me on the boat and we would sail from India to the Red Sea. He had long talked about a cleansing ocean voyage and despite friends warning me this would all end in tears, I approached it with all the enthusiasm of converting the zealot alcoholic with his mood swings and careless commentary on the world into the amusing and kindly human being he had once been. A kind of unusual activity for an atheist – not that I was against invoking all or any gods when the weather was bad and the boat staggered and fretted as waves battered it.

The deal was that we sailed across the Arabian Sea as a dry boat. When we got to the other side then we could have a drink or three. Mussa arrived with his bag clinking the betrayal of our agreement. Still, he had shown up in Cochin and after a bit of provisioning we set off for Mukalla in Yemen. I had a sense that things were not going to go well when Mussa started exclaiming about the size of the waves and taking endless photos of them. Reel after reel of film. Little did he know how difficult it is to translate a sea state onto film. Given we were off the wind and Orion was flying off the back of a small to medium swell of around a couple of metres, I was bemused by his rapt concentration as he watched old mother sea and her sibling waves. I figured nothing too bad could happen as the girl reeled off the miles to Yemen.

It took me another few days before I realised that Mussa was really cracking up out here. He was constantly drinking from the stock of spirits he brought on board. He started into diatribes about me, the boat and its deficiencies, and the size of the waves again. While the sailing was easy, Mussa's mental make-up had deteriorated. He refused to cook, refused to help with life on board and stayed in his bunk for long periods. I had visions of going up on deck at three in the morning, it's always three in the morning when things happen, to find that he wasn't there. A quick search of the boat and still no Mussa. I had visions of trying to explain to the coastguard somewhere that he had 'just disappeared', like a wraith, and yes he had been drinking, no I hadn't heard anything, no I hadn't been drinking, well no we weren't getting along too well, yes I did go back to look for him without a result. Of explaining all this to his long-suffering wife.

It was on day seven on the run across the Arabian Sea that I woke in the night to check on progress. We had seen no ships since leaving India so I was content to let the boat sail herself in this lonely patch of sea. I checked Mussa’s bunk to find it empty. He would be up in the cockpit with a drink and a cigarette I thought and hauled myself out of the hatch to find him. The cockpit was empty and I scanned the deck. No one. I ducked down below again and yelled his name.

The position is seared on my brain. As soon as I realised he wasn’t on the boat I pressed the Man Overboard button on the chart plotter.

18°29’N 66°11’E Plumb in the middle of the Arabian Sea.

It felt unreal. In a mist of uncertainty I mechanically got the sails down and fired up the engine. I motored back along the reciprocal course in the forlorn hope of finding Mussa between the dark sea and sky. The only light was the phosphorescence where the boat splashed through the sea. By morning I had zig-zagged along the return route several times and knew that I had little hope of finding him.

I drifted around on the sea for days. As the boat bobbed aimlessly on the sea it was visited by the life below. At first small fish swam round under the shadow of the hull. Bigger fish, tuna and hammerhead sharks came to feed on the smaller fish. A giant manta ray surfaced nearby to investigate the boat and the little ecosystem that it attracted. Dolphins came to play around the boat and though they are normally thought to bring luck to sailors, this time I had no such feelings. Seabirds came to pick up any scraps the larger fish left behind. Goose barnacles grew along the waterline and weed grew on the bottom. The boat floated on a marine soup under the hot tropical sun and I – I tried to think of how to lift the fog of guilt and shame that had descended over me.

I don’t know how long I drifted around in the middle of the Arabian Sea. At some point a Taiwanese purse seine netter changed course to come over and investigate what was going on. Belching black smoke it attempted to come alongside until I waved it away. The rough steel hull of the Taiwanese boat would have ripped Orion’s hull to pieces. I stood in the cockpit with my Very pistol and gesticulated at the fishing boat until eventually it moved off leaving a sooty trail of black smoke behind over my marine world.

Over the days I barely ate or drank until finally I cooked up a big pot of corned beef hash. I had no desire to catch the fish that lived under the boat. These were my friends and I talked to them. Some of them I could even recognise by a scar or a chewed fin. At some time, I don’t really remember when, I summoned the energy to hoist sails and continue on to the Red Sea. Mussa’s body had no doubt slowly sunk through the water to the bottom where fish and sea worms would make short work of it.

I reached the Gate of Tears nine days later and aimed Orion north towards the Suez Canal.

As if by some cosmic alchemy a sign appeared in the eastern sky. Now I'm more an atheist than an agnostic and I dismissed the bright speeding spear of light that lit up the sky over the Empty Quarter as more a function or dysfunction of my fatigued brain than any real event. But night after night the comet kept me company on night watch until I could no longer dismiss it as some frivolous conjoining of wayward neurons in my brain. It was real. It was the comet called Hale-Bopp as I later learned. It was my bright star in the wet salty world on Orion bashing to windward for endless days and nights.

I had whole days of imagining Mussa was still on board. I would hear him rattling around down below, lighting a cigarette in the cockpit, berating me for not having a better boat with a stronger engine, for not being a better friend. When I nodded off in the cockpit I would wake to the sound of his voice and wonder if Mussa falling overboard in the Arabian Sea was all just an awful nightmare. I found myself talking to him as if his spectral self was there. I convinced myself he was still on board and I made a pledge to look after him.

In the velvet sky of the Sahara the stars revolved overhead and the contrail of jets speeding towards Europe could be seen following the narrow Red Sea to the north. At times I wished I was on board one of those jets but most of the time I existed in my bubble on board. My beard grew wild and my face was seared by salt and sun. My rheumy eyes watched the white tops of the waves splashing over the bows and the deck. Below the boat was salt damp as if by osmosis it had spread sea air into every nook and cranny.

I anchored behind a low island off the Sudanese coast and wondered what I would do. I was loath to face anyone who had known Mussa. How to explain it to his wife? To his friends? I poured some of Mussa’s brandy into a glass and lit one of his cigarettes. Perhaps I would just carry on sailing the oceans and never touching land. The more I thought about it the more I realised I was kidding myself. Somehow the adventurer had had his insides sucked out and what I needed was succour somewhere. I looked at a chart of the Mediterranean and put my finger on Malta. Out of the way. Out of sight.

In the morning I departed and resumed the beat up against the northerly winds towards Suez. And so, I beat to windward in 20-25 plus knots and what sailors call 'square' waves. Not the nice rounded waves that you skim up and over, but square waves you bash into so the boat judders and stops before bursting through to the next and the next. It was wet and tiring, but Orion mostly steered herself and I busied myself with the day-to-day business of navigating and cooking and getting sleep when I could. Hale-Bopp kept me company through the nights, off on the eastern horizon. It took twenty-five weary days.

The agent known as the Prince of the Red Sea organised the transit through the Suez Canal. Despite the name, which sounded a bit shady to me, he organised everything efficiently with the bonus of tea and good humour in his office. My pilot, Mohammed, duly arrived and we motored off in convoy with half dozen other yachts. He seemed bemused by my half-crazed demeanour but said nothing. Mohammed kept urging me to up the revs and go faster. I kept Orion at a steady five knots which given her barnacled hull and dirty propeller was about the right speed for us. When we got to the Bitter Lakes at Ismalia the pilot boat collected Mohammed and I anchored for the night. In the morning Yusuf, the new pilot for the second half of the canal, arrived and we set off.

For Yusuf there was not too much right with the world on Orion. Or any world. He was cold so I gave him a jacket. He refused it and said he wanted the one I was wearing so I gave that to him. I made him tea and lunch and tried not to watch as he said his prayers in the cockpit but Yusuf was grumpy and dour for most of the day. At Port Said he leapt off onto the pilot boat that came to pick him up and relieved, I motored over to the Port Said Yacht Club basin. It wasn't until I got there that I realised he was still wearing my jacket, the best wet weather jacket on board. One for the gods I thought, one for my sins and one for the voyage I now had to make.

In Port Said I bought a few provisions and set off into the Mediterranean for Malta. I managed to get out through the oil rigs scattered around the approaches to Port Said and about a hundred miles off before the wind started increasing. I reefed Orion right down and struggled on until she was staggering so much under the weight of wind that we were making little progress. I wrapped up the bit of head-sail I had out and hove-to under triple reefed main. I wedged myself in the space on the floor between the galley and the chart table and braced myself there and tried not to listen to the waves hitting the hull and spilling back over her decks. In Port Said I had bought a large box of chocolate bars and I ate my way steadily through them with Beethoven's sixth on full blast on the stereo until the worst of the gale passed over some ten hours later. In so many ways I cared little about the storm and about what life held for me in the future.

Orion and I got sailing again once the wind was down to a more manageable 25 knots or so and we bucketed along in the leftover swell towards the little islands of Malta sitting in the crossroads of the Mediterranean. It was bitterly cold at sea, curiously so for the time of year, though I suspect much of it had to do with me getting all tired and fretting over an arrival in waters I knew well. Home? It didn’t feel like it, more like a descent into a strange and unknown place of which I had little sense anymore.

Steering a boat by hand on your own is a thankless game and so it was not surprising I dozed off at various times. I'd wake up to find Orion heading off to the south, the east, the west, towards Port Said, towards Lebanon, towards Libya and just occasionally towards Malta. I'd wake up from a deep sleep slumped in the cockpit and do a panic scan of the horizon to check there were no ships around and then adjust the sails to get Orion back on course. Then I would sit there helming until indeterminate hours later I would drift off for another snatched bit of sleep while Orion drifted off on a course to somewhere else. We were like a couple of sleep-walkers together, bumbling around the sea on a serpentine route somewhere towards Malta.

I surfed into Marsamxett harbour on a stormy gregale, the gnarly northeast wind they call the evil Greek wind. I took Orion straight to Manoel Island Boatyard and got them to haul her. If I felt guilty abandoning my faithful companion it didn’t register. Somehow I wanted to divorce myself from the horror of what had happened in the Arabian Sea. Ashore I took a small apartment in Gzira and there I hoped to live for a while out of sight and alone. I told no-one I am here and I keep a low profile. Orion is up for sale in the yard. I seem to have abandoned everything I know and my life has become that of a shuffling crazy man. The one people cross the street to avoid.

My local is the locals’ bar, the Sovereign on a back street nearby out of the tourist kerfuffle on the seafront. I sit at the same seat every night in a dark corner and Paul the patron brings me a carafe of the local wine. My beard is long and shaggy now and I know I look somewhat dishevelled from the reflection in the glass door to the bar. Paul has never asked me how I cast up here in the backstreets of Malta. And he keeps it that way. Sometimes the odd person walks in and sees me there, thinks they recognise me and ask Paul who I am, and Paul just shakes his head. I know I am drinking too much, several carafes of wine in the Sovereign and a well-stocked spirits cabinet in my apartment. Paul has a simple fixed menu and he will invariably bring a plate of whatever he has cooked to my table. There he will instruct me in kindly tones to eat something.

‘Mussa’, he will say, ‘You need to look after yourself more. Please eat – and drink a little less. I worry about you.’

©RJH

H