Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Black Benjamin

Author:Black, Benjamin [Black, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-08-06T20:00:00+00:00

He woke, if it could be called waking, into liquid darkness. Everything was moving under him with a slewing, sideways roll that was familiar. He thought of his student days, when he was starting to drink, and after half a dozen beers he would wake in the middle of the night with a parched mouth and a thudding headache, while the bed on which he lay revolved slowly around him like a broken carousel. Also, he was wet. He was lying on his side with his legs drawn up to his chest and half his head submerged in water. It was seawater, he knew from the texture of it. A boat, then, but a boat that had something wrong with it. There was none of the sense of a boat’s trim lightness; this vessel felt stodgy, like the barely floating hollowed-out stump of a tree.

He tried to sit up, and indeed saw himself doing it, as in a piece of trick photography, a wraith rising up out of himself while his body lay there lumpy and inert. The pain in the back of his head seemed a kind of noise, a dully pulsing roar that made the bones of his skull vibrate. He turned his head and peered up at the stars. They too seemed to be vibrating, zigzagging about, like fireflies. The last thing he had seen was the moon sliding down the sky—where was it now?

At last, with a groan, he got himself up to a sitting position. He had been wedged into the space between the two thwarts. His clothes were sopping. He put a hand cautiously to the back of his head and winced when he felt the pulpy knot under his ear. What had he been hit with? Something wooden. He looked about. Ahead there was only the darkly gleaming sea to the horizon, behind him were the lights of Dun Laoghaire, a long way off. And what was that? A boat, gliding away from him landwards, silent, white-sailed, a light glimmering at the tip of its mast. He tried to shout but his voice would not work. He was shivering now, sitting there in the slopping, warmish, deepening water. He looked to the mast. There was no sail: it had been taken away.

Deepening. The water was deepening.

He pressed forward onto his hands and knees and felt about, under the puddle of water. Sound workmanship, clinker-built. It was—could it be?—yes, it was the Rascal, his own twelve-footer. His questing hands, scrabbling and splashing, found what they had been looking for, what he had known they would find. Someone had taken a crowbar to the bottom of the boat and opened a crack between the boards six inches long and a good half inch wide; he could feel the current of colder water coming up through it, a silken flow. He had been scuttled. A strange calm came over him. She’s sinking, he thought, and I’m going to drown.

It seemed almost a joke, a prank someone had played on him.

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