Robert Wilson - The Ignoranceof Blood

As he increased power he winced at every slight modulation of noise coming to his ear, every variation in tone of the blackness coming towards him. His nerve trailed behind him like a frothy, bubbling wake. He tightened his grip on the wheel, forced himself into a routine. He stared at the fuel gauge. Below three-quarters now. This boat went through 150 litres an hour at a cruise speed of 100 kilometres per hour. He doubted he'd been over fifty kilometres per hour the entire trip, so how had he gone through a hundred and fifty litres? He looked at his watch. He'd been on the water just over two hours. Maybe that consumption was normal. Ignore it. Don't get obsessive. He checked his course, raised the throttles. The boat surged. The darkness parted before him. The thought occurred to him that he didn't want to be on a boat with a dead engine and an LPG tanker bearing down. Panic quivered below his diaphragm. He should have worn a nicotine patch, couldn't remember when he'd last been six hours without a cigarette.

Don't look at the fuel gauge.

The fuel gauge was at the halfway mark. He rapped it with a knuckle. There was a problem. Three hundred and fifty litres in three hours at the speed he was going? He pulled back the throttles, centred the shift, turned off the engines and the battery switches. Silence. The waves slapped at the sides of the boat, which lolloped on the water. He got down on his hands and knees and sniffed. He plugged the torch in his mouth and opened up the engine hatches, sniffed. Was he seriously going to be able to fix a fuel leak? He didn't even know if there were tools on board. He checked the bilge for the smell of fuel until he wasn't sure what he was smelling any more.

This had not been part of his training. Refuelling the boat in mid ocean. He turned off the fuel valves, closed the engine hatches. Found the funnel in the stern lockers, heaved out a jerry can, located the fuel fills on the right of the cockpit. Slow down. Think. What was he going to gain by this? Was he just going to pour fuel into the ocean? He checked his watch. Plenty of time. The boat rose and fell. Let's do it. He jammed the funnel in, fitted a nozzle to the jerry can, poured the fuel in, looking about himself crazily for approaching walls of metal, listening, trying to hear above his tinnitus for the distant thump of marine engines. He'd never felt such physical vulnerability. As the fuel chugged into the tank he began to think that what was happening to him now was just a physical expression of his mental condition over the last three months. The sense of powerful forces ranged against him, happy to crush him without a second thought, yet he was unable to see them, just living inside his head, his tiny inner world, desperately clinging to the bits and pieces of his life that made him feel human. He changed jerry cans. A larger wave jogged the boat, fuel cascaded down his leg. Damn. This was dangerous. He re-concentrated his efforts. Poured the last of the second jerry can into the tank. That'll do. At least he would be able to see if this had made an impression on the fuel gauge. He took off his soaked trousers, threw them overboard. He hosed down the deck, reasoned that mid ocean would have aired the cockpit of fumes. He washed his hands. Heart in his mouth, he turned on the battery switches. He didn't burst into flames. He let the blowers run.

Again he looked around. Spooked himself. Leapt for the ignition, started the engines. Nothing. Shit. He had just poured fuel into the ocean. Wait. Calm down. Open the fuel valves.

The engine started. He couldn't see with the light of the pen torch still burning faulty images on to his retina. He switched it off, jammed it in his underpants. Looked at the fuel gauge. Had it gone up? He checked the SatNav. He'd drifted off course again. The currents so strong out here. Filling up with fuel had cost him nearly two kilometres. Should he put another two jerry cans in? He listened again, stared hard into the grainy darkness which, rather than remaining stationary, seemed to be approaching him. How had he talked himself into this insane plan?

Turned off the ignition. Back to the jerry cans. Pen torch back in the mouth. Where was the funnel? He'd left it sticking out of the tank. It must have gone overboard. His eyes roved the side where the fuel fills were and it was then that he saw the words 'saddle tank' and 'main tank'. He nearly burst into tears with gratitude as he remembered something from his training. He knelt down, crawled back to the rear bench seats, switched the fuel from main tank to saddle tanks.

Engines sounded off to his right. He nearly coughed out the pen torch until he saw the container ship pass four hundred metres away. He envied those men high up, standing in the green light of the bridge, having a smoke and a coffee while their radar told them everything. Back to the SatNav. He was going south-east fast.

He started up the engines, wheeled the boat round, opened the throttles. Making headway towards the Straits of Gibraltar, he glanced at his watch. First light must be coming soon; he was desperate for an end to this blindness, this sense of impending steel hulls.

The current must be immensely strong. They'd told him it was what did for most small boats full of African immigrants. He'd seen the bodies once, lined up on a beach outside Tarifa, the Guardia Civil standing back from the stink. He gripped his forehead, banished these morbid thoughts. The current. He'd have to overshoot the target by a couple of kilometres and drift back into position.

He reined in his galloping mind. First light would come and all would be well. He looked behind him for a glimmer. Still uniformly black. He breathed back another rush of what he thought was panic, but then he was laughing, giggling uncontrollably as if he'd smoked some weed and suddenly seen the hidden absurdity of everyday life. He sat back in his seat, the hysteria trembled inside him, his thoughts quivered on the margins of sanity.

And with that came an extraordinary calm. His trepidation vanished. It was as his father-in-law had told him before undergoing his heart op in Paris: 'You push your fear like a rock up a mountain in the days beforehand and then, suddenly, they come for you and you deliver yourself into their hands and hope that Allah is with them. It is the calmest you will ever feel in this life.'

And it happened just when he hadn't been looking for it. First light. The miracle of the planets. The glow spread along the seam of the world. Ships revealed themselves against the gathering light. He would have loved to see land; even after a few hours he missed it enormously. He couldn't imagine how those lone yachtsmen who circumnavigate the globe could bear the solitude with the endless great unknown beneath them.

More light; 07.50 – twenty minutes to sunrise. His fear long gone, torn away from him and replaced by the confidence of illumination. The target should have left Tangier nearly two hours ago. He smiled to himself. This was going to work. The horizon blushed magenta, crimson, pink and violet, glowing yellow and white before creeping into blue, which became anil and made his chest ache at the thought of what he would miss. A thin streak of grey cloud, parallel to the perfect line of the horizon, like a stiletto piercing the flesh of a blood orange, made his jaw tremble with emotion.

08.07. He was at the rendezvous point. He dug out the binoculars, surveyed the sea. Five ships, now, to the west; a tanker to the east. A splashing sound ahead caught his attention and he lowered the binoculars. A school of dolphin within ten metres of the boat. Diving and surfacing, leaping and plunging. He shouted at them for joy.

The sun came up at 08.11. The horizon quivered as if a meniscus had to be broken for the red orb to push up into the sky. He spread his arms like a jubilant conductor before his orchestra and then turned his back on it, surveyed the Straits of Gibraltar again with the binoculars. He was looking for a boat, not a big ship, although this vessel was sizeable, given that it wasn't cargo-carrying. It was forty metres long, about twelve metres high, had a Moroccan flag and was called the Princess Bouchra. But he still wasn't sure of scale out here. Even a one-hundred-and-fifty-metre tanker looked like a toy on the water.