Early in the Morning

Nana scrunched her nose as she entered the “head”, and wondered at what point one should speak to a doctor about one’s bottom smells. She opened the porthole and reversed out of the room, faith in her bladder’s capacity to hold on a little longer re-invigorated. Crossing the cabin, she busied herself with the washing up, seeing as no one else was going to do it, humming the only sea shanty she knew, and pondering what “scuppers” might be and whether this boat had them. She could certainly think of a drunken sailor she would happily put there.

Above, in the cool morning air, Julia caught the tune and smiled. Grampy had always said he would love to sail, but it was Nana seemed to be in her element, and getting on with Gilbert like a house on fire too. She’d worried about the weird set up. Inviting her Nana and Grampy on holiday with her and her boyfriend might have been awkward enough in a hotel, but crammed together into a 35 foot yacht for five days could test any relationship. Alcohol helped, she supposed. Gilbert had encouraged it though. Any excuse to sail, that man. “Don’t marry him, Jules,” Mum had told her. “You’ll be a sailing widow.”

“Mum, don’t say that!” Julia had shrieked, some superstitious circuitry in her brain firing vigorously at the suggestion.

“I just mean you’ll never see him, he’ll be out sailing all the time!”

Julia had taken her mother’s words to heart, and chosen to deal with the issue by learning to sail. Now she was nearly as hooked as Gilbert, but where Gilbert loved a brisk wind across his sail and the spray in his face, this was the part Julia cherished, sitting on deck with a bowl of fruit watching a small harbour village waking up as the sun crept over the hill behind. On the bulwark, she saw Gilbert, fresh bread in one hand and a bag of oranges in the other, striding towards their mooring, and she put her bowl down on the bench and hopped onto the wooden pontoon, walking out to meet him, feeling the smoothness of the worn planks under her toes.

On board, Nana had surrendered to the inevitable and was now attempting to dress in the cramped aft cabin. The young people had given them this one for the standing room – less stooping, they said, but though they may have more vertical space, there was not much to be said for the horizontal plane, and Nana had banged every joint of her body on the wall as she tried to get her bra on. It would have been easier, of course, if she could have sat on the bed, but someone had left a small library of books, an ancient camera and three sizeable lenses on it. She had tried to solve the problem by calling the culprit for assistance, until she noticed the hearing aid on the shelf above their pillows, at which point she resigned herself to managing. She was a bit of a pro at managing.

She heard a thud at ear level, and glanced out of the port light to see a bare foot fill the view. The kids must be back with the bread for lunch, she thought, which would mean setting out quite soon. Nana sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t like sailing, per se, it was just that she rather preferred not sailing. It was the way the boat tilted so. Gilbert insisted it was perfectly safe, but Nana rather felt it was a matter of time before she went overboard.

Outside, Gilbert followed Julia along the side of the boat and into the cockpit, enjoying the warmth of sun on his back without the sweat he knew would come later. He’d always loved mornings on a sailboat, that combination of peace and bustle which made him feel like he was exactly where he was meant to be. It was different to the languor of the evening, where fatigue and darkness joined in a seductive harmony. That was delightful, of course, but this hour of calm and purpose coalescing into a crisp clarity, this was what kept him coming back. If cutting across the wind with the salt on his tongue held his heart, the mornings held his soul.

He was about to share this moment of personal insight with Julia when she summarily scuppered the epiphany. “Bloody gulls have pinched my breakfast look!”

Gilbert started down at an empty bowl and laughed, but was again curtailed by Julia. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at, yours is all but gone too.” He looked to the second bowl, a third full of chopped fruit. A reddish, juicy stain ran up one side of the bowl, as if someone had tipped the contents from one bowl into another, and Gilbert wondered if the gulls may be innocent of this particular theft.

“Morning Julia, Gilbert. Have you seen Grampy?” Nana emerged from the gloom below, pulling herself up the steep stairs using both handrails.

“I think he was here just a minute ago.” Said Gilbert, glancing back at the bowls.

“Will we be off soon do you think?” Nana asked. “Or do I have time for a quick walk around the harbour?”

Julia glanced at her watch. “No, you go Nana, you’ll only be ten minutes and we’ll start getting things ready here while you’re gone.”

Gilbert held onto Nana’s hand as she lowered one foot tentatively towards the pontoon. She would have rather held onto the metal rail, but she didn’t like to make things awkward and Gilbert had offered his hand as soon as she made to disembark. Sideways on, she reached for stability with one foot before relinquishing any contact with the fiberglass with the other. It was not that she didn’t like the boat life, it was just that her hips were not as young as they were. Which was a terrible shame really, as she was just at that moment called upon to perform, if not the splits, then a far wider angled stance than she had capacity for. As she straddled the line between the sea and the land, there was a sudden lurch, and the line became an expanding crevasse, her left foot drifting rapidly away from her right foot. Gilbert, with lightning reflexes, had her safely back on board before her trouser seams felt any real strain, but between the exertion and Julia’s cursing, Nana was feeling quite shaken.

“Chocks away!” came a call from somewhere near the back of the boat, and suddenly, Julia and Gilbert were scurrying about, pulling in this, tying up that, dragging a trailing line out of the water, and, eventually, starting the engine just in time to power the vessel away from the starboard side of a superyacht moored nearby.

“Where’s Grampy?” Julia asked, once things were under control. “Please tell me he’s still on the boat.”

Gilbert killed the engine, and the three of them listened to the tuneless hum coming from the cabin below. “Nana, do you remember how to hoist the sail?”

The crew, three quarters of them, at least, busied themselves setting the sails, but they hung slack in the calm air, and after fifteen minutes under sail, they were unsure whether they were any further forward, or simply a bit further towards the scrubby cliffs on their left. Becalmed, they furled the sails again and motored further out into the bay. The humming from the cabin, punctuated by resonant, commanding belches, had long since given way to snoring, and no one had made any suggestion that Grampy should be woken to lend a hand. Instead, they puttered on until the harbour was little more than a dimple of suggested sanctuary between steep, rocky hills. Then, they dropped the sea anchor and lay back to enjoy the tranquillity while they could.

Before long, lulled by the gentle rock of the little boat, a chorus of snores could be heard from her occupants. The long, trombone slide of an inhale, the shuddering release of an exhale, a snagging, sharp suck, a downy sigh of a release, the sounds of unintended but most glorious rest, and amongst them, the creak of the steps, the scuff of the fiberglass, the creak and groan of the shell, and the snoring, again, guttural, soft, vibratos and bass, creaks and scuffs, a grunt and a splosh and the tender susurrations of tensions dissolving on the breeze.

It was the breeze that roused them. Some instinct for wind tickled the four day whiskers on Gilberts chin and he stretched and turned to where Nana and Julia lay on the bench seats either side of the helm. “Wind’s picking up!” he said, and the two women lifted tousled heads and rubbed sleepy eyes, bringing themselves back to the task at hand.

“Shall I, you know, with the sail dear?” asked Nana.

“That would be magnificent Nana. If the wind stays with us, we’ll make the next port in time for a late lunch.”

Nana smiled. She imagined she might have a glass of wine with her lunch. And maybe dinner at a taverna. One with dancing, perhaps.