Western Approaches

Начало книги

He awakes, as usual, at 03.55. For a second or two he lies in the clammy darkness, trying to work out what’s gone wrong.

The last couple of days a thick tongue of high pressure has pushed up from the Azores, exciting weather forecasters all over northern Europe. He’s listened to the headlines on the short-wave radio: 32 °C in Amsterdam; hotter still in Paris; 35° expected this afternoon in London.

Christ, he thinks. London.

He searches for the T-shirt he carefully folded two hours earlier, checks with his fingers that it’s not inside out. His mouth tastes of the tin of sardines they’d shared last night and he knows that his breath stinks. Sardines on Ryvita. Again.

He runs his tongue along his teeth and tries to pinch the darkness from his eyes. Something’s definitely wrong. He knows it is. But, still groggy, he can’t quite fathom what.

He pulls on the T-shirt. The last week or so, before the high pressure arrived, the weather and the ocean have been brutal. Sheer concentration has kept exhaustion at bay, but now, in the eerie calm, he feels totally wiped out. Yesterday he spent hour after hour checking their progress on the GPS, a habit — in Kate’s phrase — that has become a nervous tic. But he can’t help it. Without the suck and gurgle of a following sea, no matter how hard they pull, they seem to be going nowhere. He’s sure of nothing except the heat of the day, a thick blanket that presses down on them, bringing everything to a halt: conversation, energy, belief, even the small comfort of a decent horizon. The ocean, poster blue, shimmers in the heat. Everything has become a blur. And now, as dawn breaks, this.

Читать дальше →