Free The Boat by Clara Salaman Page A

her feet and ankles.
    Johnny’s body began to prickle as the warmth seeped through his skin. He leant back against the saloon seat and listened to the rain beating down against the coachroof above them and he actually thanked Clem’s god and her prayer mat for delivering them to these people. He watched them working away. The woman had a frown of concentration set on her brow, her top lip biting the underneath one. She was probably the same age as his mother had been when she died. Her eyes were a pale blue and sloped downwards at the edges, giving her face a peculiar sadness. She looked up and caught him staring and smiled. Once again he was quite taken aback at how quickly the sadness seemed to dissipate, how she looked like an entirely different person when she smiled.
    ‘All right?’ she said to Clem, wiping her tweezers and putting them back in the medicine box. ‘That’s the worst of them out.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Clem said. She was warm now and mended. She felt blessed. Her prayer mat had worked. These people had saved them. She reached out and took Johnny’s hand in her own and kissed his fingers one by one, both of them watching as the man took out some tumbler glasses from a cupboard in the galley above the hob. He wiped them on a tea towel slowly and thoroughly in his great big hands, put them on the table then leant over the woman, his huge tipless fingers resting on her shoulder. He grabbed a large bottle of raki from the shelf behind them, slid open the coolbox and pulled out a bottle of water.
    It was exactly what they needed. They watched him pour out the raki into the glasses and add the water so that the cloudiness swirled around the glasses like smoke in the air, releasing that sweet aniseed perfume.
    ‘Get this down you!’ he said, taking a seat next to his wife, pushing the glasses across the table towards them. They picked them up, raised them and knocked back the raki. Johnny felt it burn down the sides of his throat, a shaft of flame soaring down into his gut, into his centre. The bear man topped him up immediately.
    ‘Thank you,’ Johnny said, sucking in a quick breath to cool his palate. ‘We owe you an explanation.’
    The bear man looked up at him, his dark brown eyes twinkling. ‘You don’t owe us anything,’ he said, reaching behind him on to the shelf for his cigarettes. It was a soft packet and he tapped it hard at the bottom and caught the cigarette in his lips. He tilted his head to the side and lit the cigarette quickly, smiling, chucking down the lighter on the table, watching it slide across the wood towards Johnny.
    ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked. Not waiting for a reply he stood up with bended knee, as did his wife, and from the seat beneath them pulled out a large bag of crisps and tore it open in his giant hands. He laid it open on the table, gesturing for them to tuck in while he himself picked up the guitar at his side. It seemed to Johnny that the man was in perpetual motion, his fingers now strumming chords in an easy, relaxed way, as if the tune would eventually and organically materialize of its own accord.
    Johnny and Clem were ravenous. They devoured the crisps while the man and his wife went about their business as if having bleeding, needy strangers turn up in their company was an everyday experience. He played his guitar while she sewed a button on to a garment on her lap. Johnny paused in his eating when the woman began to sing again, at once mesmerized by that voice. He put his hand on Clem’s thigh and she smiled. See! his eyes said. We always get out of our scrapes. He really believed it. He would never ever let her down. She smiled, happy now that she was warm and safe. She knocked her glass against his and made herself comfortable, tucking her feet up under her knees to listen to the bear man strumming and the woman singing and the waves bashing against the hull and the rain pounding the decks.
    ‘We thought you were a mermaid,’ Clem said when the