Two and a quarter nautical miles to the east in the North Sea, and Billy ‘Hash’ Brown finally finds the lever he’s looking for.
‘Jesus fuckin Christ,’ he says. ‘Jesus fuckin . . .’
He pulls it.
‘. . . Christ.’
And the little boat’s anchor falls from her bow. It hits the water with a heavy metal splash and she lists and complains as the steel goes in search of sand.
Hash looks out over what’s left of the North Sea to the thin crust of land he’s found at last, cooking way off in the distance like a vast pizza.
He exhales his favourite swear word.
‘Fuuuuuck.’
Home.
So near. So, so far.
At least he thinks it’s home, there are no signposts out here. He’d stood with his hands locked to the knobs on the ship’s wheel staring at the W, keeping it over the arrow in the compass bowl with blinding concentration all evening, into night and into the long new day with only the thugger-thug-thug, thugger-thug-thug of the little boat’s feeble engine for company before, finally - hopefully - sighting land just now.
It’s seven minutes before midday.
The deep, dark hours in total blackness had been the hardest. Every bump or clatter a headless man walking the lonely deck out there in front of the wheelhouse.
The plan now to wait for dark and Talbot’s voice over the CB radio calling him home.
He heads back to the wheelhouse.
‘Ah, Jesus fuckin fuck. . ,’ he spits. ‘. . . fuck!’
He’d forgotten about the radio set, the front kicked off and its body dislodged from the housing by his stinking Converse All Star shoe.
‘FUCK!’
Hash rubs the black holes of his eyes with his palms then looks again at the radio and then up to the arrow on the glass bowl compass pointing to land.
‘Fuck! Fuckin cunt!’
Home.
‘Fuck.’
He thinks of Kirrin and her array of gadgets.
‘He’ll find me? He’ll find me! He’ll fuckin have to.’
Reassured now, as much as he can be, he kills the idling engine. He looks to the shore, a wet mile or so to the west.
‘I’ll fuckin swim home.’
Silence.
Then the scream of a seagull, she’s not landing here - this boat had never had a fish on its deck. She flies away.
Hash again rubs the deep, dark holes of his eyes then steps out from the wheelhouse. The sun beats the thinning crown of his head with gold-mailed fists and so, like all good Englishmen - he takes off his t-shirt and lies on his back on the deck. He looks at the sky, one arm behind his head, the other rubbing his off-white belly - a shade Dulux has yet to put in a can.
Geordie Blue.
A brave little cotton wool ball tries to outrun the sun, vaporous wisps curling like the arms of a sprinter in slow-motion - it burns away.
‘Fuuuuuck,’ he closes his eyes. ‘Me.’
Hash lies on the deck, a washed-out corpse dragged up from the deep. Exhausted in the sunshine, only the sound of the boat gently cutting in and out of the water like a spoon into jelly. Eyes freed now from the glass onion pointing home, his mind begins to recline.