Free The Coming of the Whirlpool by Andrew McGahan

the swirling pattern was such a thing, or had some other meaning, he could not begin to guess.
    Dow shoved and Nathaniel pulled and the boat slid gratingly across the stones. The bow hit the water and lifted. Nathaniel, for all his drunkenness, hoisted himself in one swift motion over the side. In moments he was at work lowering the centreboard from its trunk. ‘Push!’ he spat over his shoulder.
    The boat slipped further out and Dow was suddenly floundering chest deep in the waves, the shore dropping away alarmingly beneath his feet. Nathaniel had loosed the sail and was yanking on ropes to raise it up the mast, canvas flapping in the wind. He glanced back. ‘What are you waiting for? Get in, you fool!’
    Soaked through, Dow hauled himself over the stern and collapsed into the boat – face down in the bilge water. He swallowed a mouthful of the foul stuff and reared up on his knees, spluttering. Nathaniel shoved him rudely down again as the wind filled the sail and the boom whipped sideways. Dow clambered out from under the old man’s feet, ducked below the threatening boom, scrambled to the forward bench and then crouched there, blinking water from his eyes.
    Already, the boat was cutting away from the beach and out into the Claw. It was Dow’s first true experience of sailing – the ride on the barge did not count, he knew – and there was none of the fluid grace he had expected. Instead the sail cracked brutally by his ear, and the bow was slamming into the waves, hammer blow after hammer blow, as if the water was hard as stone. The violence of it all was confounding. Dow could scarcely cling to his seat.
    And yet Nathaniel rode easily in the stern, one hand grasping a rope to adjust the sail, the other on the tiller. Their eyes met and the old man’s scorn burned like glee. ‘Stand on your feet, idiot,’ he called. ‘If you can!’
    Shamed and furious, Dow took hold of a line of fixed rigging – it hummed wickedly in the gale – and rose slowly. The planking beneath his feet kicked and leapt, but somehow he stayed upright; it was a matter of watching how the boat met the waves and loosening his stance to prepare for each jolt. Derisive laughter from the stern told him how ludicrous he must look, but balanced thus, he turned deliberately away from Nathaniel to face forward over the bow.
    Rain peppered his face like tiny stones. It seemed at first that they were sailing west, directly into the wind, which was surely impossible. But no – looking more attentively, Dow saw that in fact they were angling across the gale, somewhat to the north of west. Even as Dow pondered this, Nathaniel hauled on the tiller and the little craft swung across the face of wind, the boom shifting with a crack, forcing Dow to duck below it. The canvas filled again and they went slanting away across the waves once more, pursuing a south -west angle this time.
    Yes . . . Dow thought he could see it now, how the tiller and the keel must work in unison with the sail, allowing the boat to skew its way forward, in stages, against the wind. It was almost simple, really.
    He stood straighter and looked about. Behind them Stromner was already hidden by the low point which sheltered the beach; they were now well out into the channel that lay between East Head and West. On their left the heights of East Head remained lost in cloud, and on their right Stone Port was little more than a shadow through the rain. But directly to the south the channel narrowed steadily until, between the surf-lined extremities of either promontory, it terminated in the gap – approaching all too rapidly now – of the Rip.
    Dow would never have guessed that a stretch of water could look so evil. And it wasn’t because the waves there appeared any wilder than within the channel. If anything, the Rip seemed to swallow the waves, as if a dark oil lay upon the water there, suffocating the chop and