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| The Merlin Factor. Chapter Five. | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 16 2015, 11:36 PM (104 Views) | |
| crow | Dec 16 2015, 11:36 PM Post #1 |
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The Merlin Factor. Chapter Five. Instability. Entering the North Pacific High, 1990. Single-handed sailing is a demanding business. For there is no-one to help out: no-one to share the work - and danger - of reefing down, changing sails, making repairs, navigating, steering, routine maintenance, keeping a look-out against collision... Most of all, though, there is no-one to talk to. No emotional support. No-one to communicate or argue with. No ready source of encouragement or reassurance. It can be very, very lonely, way out there in the middle of the ocean. A sailor is well-advised to avoid such a solitary, inherently-dangerous undertaking, unless he or she is supremely emotionally stable. Or else doesn't give a damn either way. Single-handers run on too little sleep, taken whenever it is convenient, or possible, and in erratic patterns. Sleep taken always on a bouncing, gyrating, noisy, wholly-unstable platform. The possibility of imminent disaster always looms in the subconscious of the sleeper, keeping deep-sleep from ever really occurring. Fatigue becomes the norm. I have never been too convinced of my own emotional stability, even under relatively normal circumstances. Neither has anybody else with whom I have had to deal. And on this particular day and place, if asked, would have had to admit that I was probably a little - at best - crazy. Whereas, on land, one may well get by being psychologically marginal, when all alone at sea for any length of time, one's emotional idiosyncrasies tend to rise up and walk... Generally speaking, about a week of solitary confinement is sufficient to cause personality changes in healthy people. In one of questionable mental health, it may take only a few days for quite interesting phenomena to occur. And who really knows, anyway, what is real, and what is not? This was already my ninth day at sea. Something, perhaps, to bear in mind... ***** I set about pre-heating the `Patria' diesel stove - product of mischievous Portuguese craftsmen, with whom and with which I conduct an active love-hate relationship - for a nice cup of tea, while Jacques Merlin's eyes moved eagerly around the cabin, alert, hawk-like, taking in every detail. "What mannair of bateau is thees? Nevair 'ave I seen one en avance of thees." I gave the clumsy pronunciation a few seconds to register on my conscious mind before feeling able to respond. "It's called a trimaran. Light. Fast. Supposedly anyway. This one's a bit heavy. Got me this far though. Good boat." "I 'ave seen ze name paint on ze side. Is what zis `Random Factair'?" "Random Factor. It means - ah - unpredictable. An unexpected surprise. Can turn up anytime - anyplace - in any condition - like here. Bit like me really. I suppose. Like you, too. Sort of unknown." I felt a little embarrassed. "Ah! J'aime ca," he laughed, a deep bubbling laugh. "Is a very good name for such a bateau. She is fast?" "Oh - sometimes. I've had her making fourteen knots before. But never for very long. Beam reach - stiff breeze - calm seas. You know." He nodded sagely, knowing, still holding his dripping fish. "Here, let me take that. I'll clean it and then we'll cook it up. First fish I've seen for quite a while." Jacques handed me the fish and I started the messy business of gutting and filleting it. I paused to attend to the stove, the thin blue alcohol flame dying as I opened the diesel feed. The flame roared into its customary noisy life - customary, that is, when it actually works - making Jacques jump in surprise. "Nom de Dieu! C'est quoi ca?" He gaped at the roaring flame. "It's only the stove, old boy. No cause for alarm. Never seen one before?" He studied the flame with cautious interest, as if it were some demon fresh from the fires of hell. As well it may have been. "Such heat! But ze smell! Ze noise? Is safe, zis fire?" "Quite safe, I assure you. Very efficient too. When it works, that is. Damn thing is always clogging up though, and naturally only when you're really hungry and tired. Wonder of modern science, eh?" I laughed and laid the filets in the dented non-stick frying pan. "Just try getting parts for the damn thing." Jacques resumed his examination of the cabin while I resumed my examination of him. He was quite short, very brown and remarkably hairy. Not hairy like me, but rather covered all over in a dark tangle of body hair. Like me, though, his head was even hairier than the rest. Black shoulder-length curls and tangles, and that remarkable black beard. A single gold earring glinted from his left ear, and his eyes were the most vivid green I had ever seen. Like fake eyes, really. Too full of color to be quite authentic. He wore a faded pair of red knee-britches that had been regularly patched by an expert hand. His shirt was one-of-a-kind unique. Full at the sleeves and ruffled at the wrists and neck. The kind of shirt you might see worn by pirates in an Errol Flynn movie, only considerably more beat-up and salty. His feet were bare, with hard calluses on the soles, and very clean. All in all, a memorable figure to a refugee such as I from the world of production-line fashion conformity. A real man. Utterly and easily masculine without having to try. He grinned at me across the table, inside a rotting plywood trimaran, somewhere in space, another windswept sailor adrift upon the sea... "Look, Jacques," I began. "Do you think you might - ah - please tell me just how you came to be here?" "You 'ave ask me to come aboard, non?" I shook my head in helpless amusement. "Well yes, but I mean in your boat. How did you get here? You have no sails. Only oars. How far away is the land?" He thought about this for a while. I could see him constructing his reply. "Ze land is many 'undred kilometres far. Many. In fact ze land is as far in any direction as in any ozair. One could say, I theenk, zat we are in fact in ze middle of nowhaire. Exactly whaire are you going?" I digested this, turning the sizzling filets. The middle of nowhere. His navigation was at least as accurate as my own. "But Jacques, how did you get here?" His impossibly green eyes rolled backwards as he shrugged a good-natured shrug: "Was easy. I 'ave nevair left." I gave up. It could wait until we had eaten. "You want some lemon juice, Jacques?" I brandished a plastic lemon-shaped container of lemon juice at him. He stared wide-eyed and gradually began to snicker and twitch. I stared at him, expecting him to have some sort of seizure, but his chest started heaving in deep resonant laughter which went on and on until tears of silliness streamed down his cheeks. He made several abortive efforts to speak until finally: "Ah Dave, mon vieux!" More guffaws, "Formidable! Who but ze Engleesh would 'ave ze lemon juice in ze middle of nowhaire?" His lunatic behaviour finally got the better of me, and I gave up my customary English reserve to join him in his idiocy, until we had reduced ourselves to a couple of chortling, hiccupping marine gigglers, somewhere right off of any chart in the middle of `nowhaire' in a mid-Pacific dead-calm. It was the kind of a day one could never forget. Straight out of the twilight zone. But it was only a mild introduction to what was yet to come. ***** Qantas Flight 53, Mid-Pacific, 1990. Daphne gazed down at the silvery expanse of ocean, thirty two thousand feet below. She gazed without seeing, for there was nothing, really, to see. She simply drank in the absolute enormity of it, and it gave dimension to the absolute enormity of what she was, herself, doing here. Her mother was dying, this very minute, moving closer and closer to the end of her life, and Daphne found it very difficult to accept that she was embarking upon a luxury cruise across the Pacific while such a thing was taking place. But it had been Marion herself who had insisted... Marion had always been so authoritarian. Not that it made her daughter love her any the less. On the contrary, it gave her a strength of character that had been of great support to Daphne when she was younger. She had been able to be both Mother and Father, at the same time. Still was, really. Daphne had always loved her mother dearly. There had always been a wisdom to the woman that seemed almost larger than life. It was this very wisdom that had made it possible for Daphne to accept Marion's strictness, without resentment. Michael, her ex-husband, though, had fought against it tooth and nail, as husbands will, against in-laws, never seeing the love behind it for what it was. She glanced down at the book she held in her lap. How many times had she read it? Fifty? A hundred times? She was half way through yet another reading, allowing it to ease her through this long, long flight. She fingered the worn dust-cover: "Child Of The Air", it proclaimed, in bold letters. "A novel of undying love, by Marion Hanworth". Her mother. The author. She had only ever written the one book, but there had never been, in Daphne's opinion, a book more filled with love than this. The book alone gave her all the reason she needed to adore her mother. Anyone capable of such love - such depth of emotion - was somebody special beyond doubt. The picture on the cover had always puzzled her, until Marion had one day explained it to her: It was an in-flight image of a small, reddish-brown falcon, with black bars on its wings and tail. Speckled body. Black orbs for eyes. A cruel beak and the look of vast wisdom on its face. A hunter, to be sure. And yet, a being of knowledge, too. Of Magic! Marion had told her the bird was called a Merlin, like the magician, like the Rolls-Royce engine that had carried her Johnny into battle in his Spitfire. She could remember well her Mother's face as she told these things to her: the look of reverence, almost awe. The lowered voice. The vast, endless love... She opened the little book, seeing her own, faded name, written in the shaky handwriting of the little girl she had once been: "Daphne Guinevere Hanworth. Her book." The volume was almost as old as she was. Printed in nineteen forty-six. She could have quoted most of its contents without looking... Her gaze returned to the ocean, far, far below, unseeing, unfocused. A single paragraph from the book came to her, word for word: "He loved the Sound! It powered him. Made him stand up and fight! It was the Sound: the moaning thunder of the Lion roused from years of timid sleep. The British Lion, pushed, prodded, goaded into rage. The Sound! The Merlin came, in time of greatest need, as did Merlin the Enchanter come to England of old. As Merlin delivered Camelot, did Rolls-Royce deliver the Merlin to England, to give the Lion back its legs, to thunder its defiance at the armies of darkness. The Sound of the Merlin came to be the Sound of Deliverance to an embattled, desperate England." "Merlin," she whispered, gazing still at the endless ocean spread out far beneath her. "Oh, Merlin. Where are you now?" ***** England: Gunton Park, Norfolk, 1990. Marion rocked gently in her chair, tearful, as the pain inside her grew stronger. She faced the lacy curtains of the open bedroom window, looking out upon the world that she would soon be leaving. The ruined mill still sat by the little lake. The odd cow still wandered through the clumps of waving bullrushes. She looked up into the blue summer sky, imagining she could still hear the Sound... Then she saw it. A speeding speck, growing larger, rapid wingbeats, blurring, humming, vibrating. With a whisper of disturbed air, the falcon alighted on the window-ledge and peered in at her. She held her breath, not daring to move, lest the movement somehow cause it not to be. It was the bird from her dreams! The Merlin... ***** |
| "Squawk!" said the crow, and then made space. | |
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7:11 AM Jul 11