Slay Ride Read online

  Bits of distant geography lessons made no sense. ‘The Gulf Stream warms the coast of Norway…’ Good old Gulf Stream. Where had it gone?

  Cold had never seemed a positive force to me before. I supposed I had never really been cold, just chilled. This cold dug deep into every muscle and ached in my gut. Feeling had gone from my hands and feet, and my arms and legs felt heavy. The best long-distance swimmers had a nice thick insulating layer of subcutaneous fat: I hadn’t. They also covered themselves with water-repelling grease and swam alongside comfort boats which fed them hot cocoa through tubes on demand. The best long-distance swimmers were, of course, usually going twenty miles or so further than I was.

  I swam.

  The waves seemed frighteningly big: and I couldn’t see where I was aiming unless I lifted my head right up and trod water, and that wasted time and energy.

  The nearest-looking land seemed to my salt-stinging eyes to be as far away as ever. And surely Oslo fjord should be a Piccadilly Circus of boats? But I couldn’t see a single one.

  Dammit, I thought. I’m bloody well not going to drown. I’m bloody well not.

  I swam.

  Daylight was slowly fading. Sea, sky, and distant mountains were all a darker grey. It began to rain.

  I travelled, it seemed, very slowly. The land I was aiming for never appeared to be nearer. I began to wonder if some current was cancelling out every yard I swam forward: but when I looked back, the land behind was definitely receding.

  I swam mechanically, growing tired.

  Time passed.

  A long way off, straight ahead, pinpricks of light sprang out against the fading afternoon. Every time I looked, there were more. The city was switching on in the dusk.

  Too far, I thought. They are too far for me. Land and life all around me, and I couldn’t reach them.

  An awful depth beneath. And I never did like heights.

  A cold lonely death, drowning.

  I swam. Nothing else to do.

  When another light shone out higher up and to the left, it took at least a minute for the news to reach my sluggish brain. I trod water and wiped the rain and sea out of my eyes as best I could and tried to make out where it came from: and there, a great deal nearer than when I’d last looked, was the solid grey shape of land.

  Houses, lights, and people. All there, somewhere, on that rocky hump.

  Gratefully I veered fifteen degrees left and pressed on faster, pouring out the carefully hoarded reserves of stamina like a penitent miser. And that was stupid, because no shelving beach lay ahead. The precious land, when I reached it, proved to be a smooth sheer cliff dropping perpendicularly into the water. Not a ledge, not a cranny, to offer even respite from the effort of staying afloat.

  The last quarter mile was the worst. I could touch the land if I wanted to, and it offered nothing to cling to. There had to be a break somewhere, if I went far enough, but I had practically nothing left. I struggled feebly forward through the slapping waves, wishing in a hazy way that I could surge through warm calm water like Mark Spitz and make a positive touchdown against a nice firm rail, with my feet on the bottom. What I actually did was a sort of belly-flop onto a small boat slipway bordered with large rock slabs.

  I lay half in and half out of the water, trying to get back breath I didn’t know I’d lost. My chest heaved. I coughed.

  It wasn’t dark; just the slow northern twilight. I wouldn’t have minded if it had been three in the morning: the cold wet concrete beneath my cheek felt as warm and welcoming as goose feathers.

  Footsteps crunched rhythmically along the quay at the head of the slipway and then suddenly stopped.

  I did a bit towards lifting my head and flapping a numb hand.

  ‘Hvem er der?’ he said; or something like it.

  I gave a sort of croak and he walked carefully, crabwise, down the slipway towards me, a half seen, well-wrapped figure in the rainy gloom.

  He repeated his question, which I still didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘Can you help me?’

  Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then he went away.

  So what, I thought tiredly. At least from the waist up I was safe in Norway. Didn’t seem to have the energy to drag myself uphill till my feet were out, not just for a minute or two. But I would, I thought, given time.

  The man came back, and brought a friend. Ungrateful of me to have misjudged him.

  The companion peered through the rain and said, ‘You are English? Did you say you are English?’ His tone seemed to suggest that being English automatically explained such follies as swimming in October in shirt and underpants and lying about on slipways.

  ‘Yes’ I said.

  ‘You fell off a ship?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  I felt his hand slide under my armpit.

  ‘Come. Out of the water.’

  I scraped myself onto the slipway and with their help more or less crawled to the top. The quay was edged with railings and posts. I sat on the ground with my back against one of the posts and wished for enough strength to stand up.

  They consulted in Norwegian. Then the English speaking one said, ‘We will take you to my house, to dry and get warm.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and by God I meant it.

  One of them went away again and came back with a battered old van. They gave me the front passenger seat though I offered to drip in the back, and whisked me about a quarter of a mile to a small wooden house, standing near two or three others. There was no village, no shops, no telephone.

  ‘This is an island,’ my rescuer explained. ‘One kilometre long, three hundred metres across.’ He told me its name, which seemed to me like ‘gorse’.

  His living room was small and bright, and warmed by the huge stove which took up at least a sixth of the floorspace. Seen clearly in the light he himself was a short friendly man of middle age with hands that were used for work. He shook his head over me and produced first a blanket and then, after some rummaging, a thick woollen shirt and a pair of trousers.

  ‘You are not a sailor,’ he said matter of factly, watching me fumble off my shirt and pants.

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  My wallet fell on the floor. I was surprised it was still there; had forgotten it. The Norwegian-only rescuer politely picked it up and handed it to me, smiling broadly. He looked very like his friend.

  Between hopeless bouts of shivering I told them what had happened and asked them how I could get back to the city. They talked to each other about it while I dressed, first with a lot of shaking of heads but finally with a few nods.

  ‘When you are warmer we will take you by boat,’ said the English-speaker. He looked at the wallet which lay now on a polished pine table. ‘We ask only that you will pay for the fuel. If you can.’

  Together we took out my sodden money and spread it on the table. I asked them to take whatever they liked, and after debate they chose a fifty kroner note. I urged them to double it. It wouldn’t cost so much, they protested, but in the end they put two notes aside and dried the rest for me quickly on the stove so that the edges curled. After more consultation they dug in a cupboard and brought out a bottle of pale gold liquid. One small glass followed, and a moderate tot was poured into it. They handed it to me.

  ‘Skol’ they said.

  ‘Skol I repeated.

  They watched interestedly while I drank. Smooth fire down the throat, heat in the stomach, and soon a warm glow along all the frozen veins.

  They smiled.

  ‘Aquavit,’ said my host, and stored the precious bottle away ready for the next needy stranger who swam to their doorstep.

  They suggested I should sit for a while on the one comfortable-looking chair. Since various muscles were still trembling with weakness this seemed a good idea, so I rested while they busied themselves putting out businesslike sets of oilskins, and by the time they were kitted up my skin had returned from a nasty bluish purplish white to its more usual s
hade of sallow.

  ‘D’you feel better?’ my host observed, smiling.

  ‘I do.’

  They nodded, pleased, and held out a spare set of oilskins for me to put on. They took me in a big smelly fishing boat back up the twinkle-edged fjord to the city, and it rained all the way. I spent the journey calculating that I had been in the water for about two hours, which didn’t prove anything in particular about the current in the fjord or the inefficiency of my swimming or the distance I had travelled, but did prove pretty conclusively that the temperature was more than one degree above freezing.

  2

  They waited while I changed at the Grand, so that they could take back the lent clothes. We parted with warm handshakes and great camaraderie, and it was only after they had gone that I realised that I didn’t know their names.

  I would have liked nothing better than to go to bed and sleep for half a century, but the thought of Arne’s wife waiting for him to come home put a damper on that. So I spent the next couple of hours with various Norwegian authorities, reporting what had happened.

  When the police finished taking notes and said they would send someone to tell Mrs Kristiansen, I suggested that I should go too. They agreed. We went in an official car and rang the bell of Flat C on the first floor of a large timber house in a prosperous road not far from the city centre.

  The girl who opened the door looked enquiringly out at us from clear grey eyes in a firm, friendly, thirtyish face. Behind her the flat looked warm and colourful, and the air was thick with Beethoven.

  ‘Is Mrs Kristiansen in?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am Mrs Kristiansen.’

  Not in the least what I would have expected. Oddballs like Arne shouldn’t turn out to have slender young wives with thick pale blonde hair falling in loose curls on their shoulders. She looked away from my own less striking face to the policeman behind me, and the eyes widened.

  ‘I’m David Cleveland,’ I said. ‘I was with Arne this afternoon…’

  ‘Oh were you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, do come in… I’m so glad…’

  She held the door wider and turned to call over her shoulder.

  ‘Arne,’ she said. ‘Arne, see who’s here.’

  He stepped into the hall. Very much alive.

  We stared at each other in consternation. My own face must have mirrored the surprise and shock I saw on his, and then he was striding forward with his hand outheld and his face creasing into the most gigantic smile of all time.

  ‘David! I don’t believe it. I have reported you drowned.’ He clasped both my hands in both of his and shook them warmly. ‘Come in, come in, my dear fellow, and tell me how you were saved. I have been so grieved… I was telling Kari…’

  His wife nodded, as delighted as he was.

  The policeman behind me said, ‘It would seem Mr Kristiansen wasn’t drowned after all, then,’ which seemed in our high state of relief to be extremely funny. We all laughed. Even the policeman smiled.

  ‘I was picked up by some fisherman near Nesodden,’ Arne told him. ‘I reported the accident to the police there. They said they would send a boat to look for Mr Cleveland, but they weren’t very hopeful of finding him. I’d better call them…’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the policeman. ‘That would be helpful,’ and he smiled once more at us all and went away.

  Kari Kristiansen shut the front door and said ‘Do come in, we must celebrate,’ and led me through into the living room. Beethoven was thundering away in there, and Kari switched him off. ‘Arne always plays loud music when he’s upset,’ she said.

  Out in the hall Arne busied himself with the telephone, and among his explanatory flow of Norwegian I caught my own name spoken with astonishment and relief.

  ‘It is wonderful,’ he said, coming into the room and rubbing his hands together. ‘Wonderful.’ He gestured to me to sit on a deep comfortable sofa near a cheerful wood-burning fire. ‘The Nesodden police say they sent a boat out to search for you, but it was too dark and raining and they could see nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry they had the trouble,’ I said.

  ‘My dear fellow…’ He spread his fingers, ‘It was nothing. And now, a drink, eh? To celebrate.’

  He filled glasses of red wine from a bottle standing already open on a side-table.

  ‘Arne has been so depressed all evening,’ Kari said. ‘It is truly a miracle that you were both saved.’

  We exchanged stories. Arne had torn off the red clothes and kicked his boots off instantly (I suppose I should have known that a man at home on the sea would wear loose gumboots), but although he had called my name and searched around for some minutes he had caught no sign of me.

  ‘When I last saw you,’ he said apologetically, ‘You were still in the dinghy, and I thought the speedboat must have hit you directly, so when I could not see you I thought that you must be already dead.’

  He had started swimming, he said; and knowing a lot more than I did about tides and winds, had taken almost the opposite direction. He had been picked up near the coast by a small home-going fishing boat which was too low on fuel to go out into the fjord to look for me. It had however landed him in the small town where he reported my loss, and from there he had returned by hired boat to the city.

  My story was so much the same that it could be told in two sentences: I swam to an island. Two men brought me back in a boat.

  Arne searched among an untidy pile of papers and triumphantly produced a map. Spreading it out, he pointed to the widest part of the fjord and showed both Kari and me where we had been sunk.

  ‘The worst possible place,’ Kari exclaimed. ‘Why did you go so far?’

  ‘You know me,’ said Arne, folding the map up again. ‘I like to be moving.’

  She looked at him indulgently. ‘You don’t like to be followed, you mean.’

  Arne looked a little startled, but that complex of his stood out like Gulliver in Lilliput.

  I said, ‘The police asked me if I saw the name of that speedboat.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Arne.

  I shook my head. ‘No. Did you?’

  He blinked through one of those maddening pauses into which the simplest question seemed to throw him, but in the end all he said was ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think there was any name to see,’ I said.

  They both turned their faces to me in surprise’

  There must have been,’ Kari said.

  ‘Well… I’ve no impression of one…. no name, no registration number, no port of origin. Perhaps you don’t have things like that in Norway.’

  ‘Yes we do,’ Kari said, puzzled. ‘Of course we do.’

  Arne considered lengthily, then said, ‘It was going too fast… and straight towards us. It must have had a name. We simply didn’t see it.’ He spoke with finality, as if the subject could hold no more interest. I nodded briefly and let it go, but I was certain that on that thundering black hull there had been nothing to see but black paint. How were they off for smugglers, I wondered, in this neck of the North Sea?

  ‘It’s a pity,’ I said. ‘Because you might have got compensation for your dinghy.’

  ‘It was insured,’ he said. ‘Do not worry.’

  Kari said, ‘It’s disgraceful he did not stop. He must have felt the bump… even a big heavy speedboat, like Arne says it was, could not crush a dinghy without feeling it.’

  Hit and run, I thought flippantly. Happens on the roads, why not on the water?

  ‘Arne was afraid you could not swim.’

  ‘Up and down a pool or two,’ I said. ‘Never tried such long-distance stuff before.’

  ‘You were lucky,’ she said seriously.

  ‘Arne too.’ I looked at him thoughtfully, for I was younger by a good ten years and I had been near to exhaustion.

  ‘Oh no. Arne’s a great swimmer. A great sportsman, all round. Very fit and tough.’ She smiled ironically, but the wifely pride was there. ‘He used to win across-country
ski races.’

  There had been several sets of skis stacked casually in an alcove in the hall, along with squash rackets, fishing rods, mountain walking boots and half a dozen anoraks like the lost red one. For a man who liked to keep moving, he had all the gear.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Kari asked suddenly. ‘Since your swim, I mean? Did you think of eating?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I suppose I was worried about Arne.’

  She stood up, smiling. ‘Arne had no appetite for his supper.’ She looked at the clock. Ten minutes before ten. ‘I will bring something for you both,’ she said.

  Arne fondly watched her backview disappearing towards the kitchen.

  ‘What do you think of her, eh? Isn’t she beautiful?’

  Normally I disliked men who invited admiration for their wives as if they were properties like cars, but I would have forgiven Arne a great deal that evening.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, more truthfully than on many similar occasions; and Arne positively smirked.

  ‘More wine,’ he said, getting up restlessly and filling both our glasses.

  ‘Your house, too, is beautiful,’ I said.

  He looked over his shoulder in surprise. ‘That is Kari as well. She… it is her job. Making rooms for people. Offices, hotels. Things like that.’

  Their own sitting-room was a place of natural wood and white paint, with big parchment-shaded table lamps shedding a golden glow on string-coloured upholstery and bright scattered cushions. A mixture of the careful and haphazard, overlaid with the comfortable debris of a full life. Ultra-tidy rooms always oppressed me: the Kristiansens’ was just right.

  Arne brought back my filled glass and settled himself opposite, near the fire. His hair, no longer hidden, was now more grey than blond; longer than before, and definitely more distinguished.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’d like to see the racecourse Chairman, if I could.’

  He looked startled, as if he had forgotten the real purpose of my visit.