Death Roll by Sam Llewellyn

Author:Sam Llewellyn [Llewellyn, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Hat
Published: 2012-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

It would have been a long walk home, if I had not had a 1,000 peseta note in my trouser pocket. As it was, I got a taxi to where the tarmac stopped and walked through the Elysian Fields, barren and lunar in the grey starlight, towards the floodlit finger of the Hotel El Gordo.

The crew meeting next morning was at the Club Deportivo marina in Marbella. I caught the nine o’clock bus. It was already hot enough to stick my shirt to my back as I walked down the white road between the dusty building sites to Calle de las Rosas, home of Squeal.

The sign said BAR BRIC-A-BRAC – BEER – INTERNATIONAL ATMOSPHERE. The plate glass window needed a clean, and the blind inside was spotted with fly-dirt. It was closed. It looked like the kind of bar that did not open till much, much later. As I walked back along the promenade, the Mediterranean rustled among concrete groynes on my right. Thick-necked blond tourists were already drinking beer in the beach bars. I found a quiet bar, and sat at the zinc counter in the cool inside and drank coffee. While I drank it, I wondered why Helen had kissed me last night under the palms by the side of the big road, and what she was doing with Jake the singer. It was a small cup of coffee, so I did not wonder for long. When I had finished, I shoved twenty-five pesetas into the telephone and dialled the race office. They told me Honiton was away, but he would be returning in the evening, if I wished to make an appointment. I made an appointment, paid, and left.

At ten to ten I was on the Dique de Levante breakwater that flings an arm round the marina. The sea breeze was just getting up. There was hardly enough of it to tickle your face, but it blew away the race office and the sunburned early beer-drinkers and set my heart thumping with pleasurable anticipation as I walked towards the eight tall, slim masts at the end of the quay.

They were already working on the boat when I got to the end of the breakwater. It was the usual routine: seizing anything that could come unscrewed, taping anything that could chafe, sticking woollen tell-tales to the sails. When you are racing against some of the best skippers in the world, you do not leave anything to chance.

Charlie looked tired, as usual. Scotto and Noddy and Dike looked large and brown and hot.

We cast off the lines, and I backed the boat out of its berth, and motored past the white ends of the breakwater and into the dazzling blue Mediterranean, frosted with little patches of breeze.

The sails went up. I turned off the engine and pulled the nose off the wind. In the new quiet, the cockpit sole came suddenly alive underfoot, and the chuckle of the wake became a tiny roar at the tail of the long, sloping transom.

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