Page 16 of Swept Away

I ignore the deck chair. I’m not nearly as confident about being rescued as I was three hours ago. We’ve not seen a single boat yet. We got on the houseboat at about midnight last night, and it’s three thirty now—that’s more than fifteen hours of floating around without seeing another soul.

Wherever we’ve ended up…I’m starting to worry it’s somewhere no one else goes.

Zeke

We’re inside theboat now, me on the sofa, her on one of those new chairs—it’s just too hot out on the deck. I lean over to top up Lexi’s cup of milk. We decided to drink that first, though really we should probably have chucked it already—it’s been in a warm fridge all night. Food hygiene’s drilled into me, but there’s no five-star rating to hit here, and throwing food away feels so stupid. All the options feel stupid.Ifeel stupid.

I can’t believe I made her feel afraid.

“Thanks,” Lexi says, without looking at me.

I fidget, pulling one foot up underneath me, trying to get comfortable on the thin cushions of the crappy wooden “sofa.” I’m already feeling cooped up. I remember this sensation too well. Dad, Lyra and Jeremy would sit on this sofa hunched over their wooden puzzles for hours, and I’d be fizzing up like a bottle of Coke when you shake it—like I was going to explode.There’s plenty of puzzles to do, Dad would say. I hated those puzzles. I tried to sit down and figure them out, but it’d take less than a minute before I’d feel my fingers flexing with the urge to chuck the little wooden cubes against the wall.

I miss my mum. I should probably be thinking of my dad right now—that’s why I bought this boat, isn’t it?—but when it comes to crisis situations, it’s always Mum I want. Call my dad for advice and he’d give you a weird hack he saw on Reddit, or something some bloke told him in a pub garden in 1998. My mum can be overbearing, and my relationship with her is all kinds of complicated, but right now I’d kill to hear her pick up the phone with a briskHow are you, Ezekiel? What do you need?

“I think I’ll just…get back to making the inventory,” Lexi says, standing up to take her plate to the kitchen.

Things are feeling awkward. No surprise, probably, since in the last twelve hours she’s accused me of boat theft and held me at knifepoint. Meanwhile I’ve barbecued, been emotionally illiterate, and poked at some boat mechanics I’m totally unqualified to understand. I grit my teeth, so pissed off with myself. I know I’m no saint, but I amnotthat sort of man.

“I’ll get back to watching for boats,” I say, since that’s actually useful.

“Right.” She doesn’t even turn around.

As I stand up, I’m suddenly hit with the weirdest feeling that none of this is real. As if I’m standing in the middle of a set. As if someone is going to remove a panel of sky and I’ll find it’s just plywood.

I stop and stare at it all. The mini oil paintings of animals and seasides in their tatty frames. The chairs opposite me, fixed to the spots where Dad used to keep three mini beanbags, one for each of us kids. The paisley-patterned standing lamp that was definitely Dad’s, but that I can’t imagine him ever going out and buying, because I can’t really imagine my dad doing anything that normal. And the dark wood everywhere—the walls, the floor.

“You OK?” Lexi asks. She’s turned around now, leaning back against the kitchen countertop, watching me.

“Yeah. Just feeling sort of…”

I can’t find a way to say it. I chew at my cheek, embarrassed—I’m often slow to find the right words. But Lexi doesn’t act like it’s strange that I’ve run the sentence out before it’s done. She just waits.

“I, uh, I felt for a second like everything wasn’t really here.”

Lexi nods, and for a moment her eyes soften. “That’ll be the shock,” she says.

“Right. I guess I’ll…adjust.”

Her eyes sharpen again. “You won’t need to adjust,” she says, turning her back to me again. “Because any minute now, we’re getting off this boat.”

Six hours later, and we’re still here.

It’s getting…I don’t know. Both more and less surreal. We’ve ended up having to do normal stuff, like making dinner—three-cheese pasta, on the tiny gas hob—and sayingexcuse meas we squeeze past each other in the narrow gap between the kitchen and the bathroom. But with every minute that passes, it becomes more obvious that we’re in a properly horrifying situation.

I’ve not spent a lot of time imagining how I’d do in a survival-type scenario, but I’d have backed myself to be one of the ones building a life-float out of tree branches or swimming out to search the fallen plane. No planes or trees here, though. We’ve got flea-market wall art, dead batteries and Tesco Value salad. I kind of wish this was a desert island—I wish I was writingHELPin the sand and collecting wood for a signal fire. Instead, I’m wondering how long Red Leicester takes to go bad, already itchy with cabin fever.

“So,” Lexi says, clearing her throat as I pass her a bowl of pasta on the deck. “We should probably…talk.”

“Sure,” I say, pulling out both of the deck chairs with my free hand. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Well, I hardly know you. And right now you’re the only personwho can help if I fall into the sea and a bunch of sharks try to eat me. So we should probably build on the trust.”

Her eyes tighten slightly as she says this—embarrassment, maybe, about the whole thing with the knives. I don’t want her to feel embarrassed.I’mthe one that’s been a total idiot.

“Tell me about why you bought this houseboat,” she says.

I appreciate the gesture. It’s the first time she’s actually said she believes it belongs to me, not Penny. It’s an olive branch, maybe.

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