Read Online After the Storm by Jane Lythell - Free Book Online Page B

and was trying to sail them back onto their original course but they were making little headway.
    The day passed slowly as they sailed for hour after hour and scanned the horizon and saw no other boats or ships or any sign of a coastline. Owen could not understand why they hadn’t spotted land, which he had expected to see from about three o’clock that afternoon. He looked at his chart again and regretted that his GPS was dead.
    ‘I know we were blown badly off course, but where are we?’
    Kim shrugged and said nothing. It was as if they had all been battered into a kind of torpid submission by the rough night, the empty sea and their own unspoken anxieties.
    Rob however started to feel better. He washed his face and cleaned his teeth, changed his T-shirt and came up and sat in the cockpit. He was ashamed that he had been so sick the night before. He wanted very much to be a good sailor and Anna had managed to get through the storm without throwing up. She sat next to him now saying little. She didn’t have to, her face said it all. She looked as if she was enduring a particularly painful ordeal.
    About an hour later Rob spotted a group of large purple-blue jellyfish floating by the boat.
    ‘Come look at these,’ he shouted.
    They gathered round him and looked to where he was pointing.
    ‘Those are Portuguese man-of-wars,’ Owen said. ‘You have to be careful around those. They have these long tentacles that float below them; can be thirty feet long sometimes. And even dead man-of-wars can give a sting.’
    ‘Yep, we had a buddy who brushed by a dead one and he got a nasty sting from it,’ Kim said.
    They all gazed fascinated, almost mesmerised, as the purple-blue colony moved rhythmically across the surface of the sea and they watched until they were out of sight.
    ‘Now I understand “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”,’ Anna said. ‘You are so glad to see any sign of life in this huge vastness.’
    ‘The sea can be a lonely place,’ Owen said.
    ‘We need food. I’ll get cooking,’ Kim said.
    She cooked them spicy vegetable stew with rice. She sliced onions and red peppers and fried them with garlic and spices, then added a can of tomatoes and a can of kidney beans to the pan. It was quite a thing to watch her cooking under those conditions. She used a canvas strap to clip herself to the crash-bar in front of the stove. This allowed her to keep on her feet as the boat rolled. She unlocked the gimbal on the stove so that it pivoted and remained level as the boat moved up and down.
    ‘I couldn’t cook without my bumstrap,’ she said.
    They sat in the cockpit and ate her stew.
    ‘This is making me feel better. You’re a miracle worker,’ Rob said.
    ‘My pleasure, and it should be an easier night for us all tonight.’
    ‘I’ll stay on watch with Kim. You two try to get some sleep,’ Owen said.
    Anna and Rob went to their cabin and undressed in silence. They lay side by side while the boat pitched, though less violently than the night before. They were both awake and Rob was brooding. All she had said to him in the last hour was that she had a chapped bum. Usually they would have laughed about this. They hadn’t this time. He was learning how tensions were intensified when you lived in such a small space. There was nowhere to go and reactions that needed to come out had to be pushed down and contained. He was still feeling rough and her silence was weighing on him like a judgement.
    ‘Sometimes I find your negativity so oppressive you know. It’s like a burden I have to carry,’ he said.
    ‘That’s not fair.’
    ‘You’ve been making it clear from the beginning that you think this is all a big mistake. So when things go wrong, like last night, you make me feel guilty.’
    She knew there was some truth to his complaint. She was feeling resentful that he’d persuaded her to board the boat. The problem was that she didn’t know how to shake herself out of that feeling because her fears