Page 61 of Swept Away

I swear, looking up at the slackness of the sail, then back to Zeke, who is twisting the wheel, sinews standing out on his forearms. Could we make a paddle big enough to help us steer this houseboat? Suddenly the boat that has seemed so small for the last week seems absolutely enormous. I clutch at my chest, clutch at the railings, because we’re drifting on by, and there’s the ladder, there, there, sliding away from us in horrible slow motion.

“We’re going to miss it,” Zeke says. “We’re going to—”

“Help!” I yell, tilting my head up. My voice is so small compared to the awful grandeur of this place. It echoes, but the sound is lost under theslapandwhooshof the waves. “Help us! Help!”

Nobody comes. The boat drifts on. This is the slowest, most torturous way to lose all hope.

I clench my jaw and bend to unfasten my boots. “I’m going to do something.”

I pull my shirt off over my head, then grab the rope curled on the deck, the one we use to lower our bucket in and out of the sea,the one that started this mess in the first place. I begin to tie it around my waist.

“Lexi?”

“I’ll swim across.”

My hands are shaking so much it’s hard to secure a knot; the rope is too tight, cutting into the bare skin of my midriff, but I’m already readying myself to dive into the water. The breeze sends my skin goose-pimpling, and a wave touches my bare feet, startlingly cold.

“That’s—Lexi, no—you’ll get hurt!”

“What the fuck else are we going to do!” I yell, hating the way my voice is shaking, hating how hard it is to force myself through the gap in the railings onto that ledge at the edge of the boat, the one I walked along, drunk, wondering what it would feel like to let myself fall.

I’m only a few meters away from something to hold on to. It’s not like I’m diving into the open ocean, the way Zeke did to save Eugene. But all the same, I’m so scared I can’t form a cohesive thought, like all the parts of it are scattering in the wind.

I dive. The cold grips me a second after I hit the water, like the pain did yesterday when I hit my head—it strikes with the same hammer blow, and I gasp, mouth burning as I swallow seawater. I’m afraid I’ll be too cold to swim, but my limbs move, sluggish but insistent. One stroke, another. My muscles begin to burn. The rope is slack, and it tangles around my left leg—for a moment I panic, but I manage to kick it free and forge on, letting it float behind me.

Zeke is shouting something I can’t catch. This is the hardest thing my body has done in a very long time. I’m so broken from the last twenty-four hours—I’m astonished I have any strength in me. I let out a roar as I get close, a hand’s width from the ladder, my nose and mouth full of seawater. When my knuckles strike metal, I almost go under with the relief of it. I hold myself there with botharms wrapped around the bar, wet rust painting my arms, flaky and blood-red. Zeke whoops across the water. I have just enough breath to manage a laugh.

“Lexi Taylor!” he yells. “You just did that! You really just did that!”

I look back. It is so strange seeingThe Merry Dormousefrom the outside after all this time—it looks rougher than when I saw it last, its paint dulled and worn, that wonky, wild sail sticking out of its roof like a flag on a kid’s sandcastle.

And it’s still moving. If this rope around my middle strains taut, then I’m about to be pulled into the tide with the weight of a whole houseboat.

I swear, scrabbling for a foothold on the ladder. Now that the adrenaline of the swim is easing off, I’m so cold and my muscles are so strained that even moving my own weight through the water is an effort.

“You can do this,” Zeke calls, and it shouldn’t help—what a ridiculously banal thing for him to say in the circumstances—but it does.

I’m up now, on shaking legs, knees knocking against the metal, my numb hands already fumbling to undo the rope around my middle.

I don’t know how to tie a rope properly. That much has been made fairly obvious. I don’t even know what I do, looping bits around other bits and through metal bars, all the while trembling all over, standing there on a ladder in the North Sea in my M&S bra and some knickers that almost but don’t quite match.

The rope groans, and the boat begins to turn as it pulls taut. I can’t watch; instead, I rest my head against the ladder, close my eyes and start to cry.

Zeke

She rests formaybe two minutes before she begins trying to pull the boat in.

“Lexi,” I call across the distance between us. “You can’t do that. It’s just—it’s not going to be possible.”

My voice echoes under the rig. She’s wrenching on the rope one-handed because she needs to hold the ladder, arm muscles popping, an agonized grimace on her face.

“Lexi, stop!”

“How the hell else am I getting you here?” It’s half sentence, half sob.

“I can just swim over. We can leave the boat to…”

“Crash into one of those pillars and go under? No. No. She’s coming here and we’re going to get her secure.”

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