Half an hour later, they were on the water, lifejackets buckled and the old sail boat’s patched sails bellying and flapping as they slipped their mooring and drifted across the lagoon. They passed the smaller day-trip sailboats bobbing along the coastlines, moored in coves and bays for family days out, the tinny sound of music playing on radios drifting over the waves, children’s shrieks as they jumped and splashed from the rocks carrying to the ear and making heads – even his – instinctively turn. He felt a burst of intense emotion as he realized he was part of that scene too – sailing with his son.
He looked across at Linus, staring down into the water. Its surface was a rich, glossy peacock-blue, occasional flashes of dazzling light catching on the seam of a ripple. The water was so clear, Linus could see a school of tiny silver fish flicking one way, then the other, far down below the boat, his arm dangling over the side and trailing in the water as though he might touch them. Bell, by contrast, was enjoying the warmth on her skin and kept automatically angling her face upwards, like a daisy trying to find the sunlight. Emil tried not to look at her at all.
They approached Summer Isle, on their starboard side, and he saw how Linus looked up as they passed, his body tensing as he scanned the shoreline for sight of his mother, his sisters, Max, getting ready to wave, to shout . . . The happy expansive feeling in his chest contracted violently and in one sharp movement, he turned the boat away, snatching the view from sight, seeing how his son’s head turned instinctively towards him, unformed protest stoppered in his throat. They sailed clear of the lagoon’s claustrophobic embrace and pointed towards a horizon that stretched out – endless, empty, clear. Almost immediately, he felt released from the archipelago’s rhythms of normality, from home and the long lonely hours, where the mundane imposed itself – what to eat, what to wear, what to do . . . He felt himself breathe more easily again, the immediate threats quenched.
The horizon was sharp and precise, as though painted around the earth’s waist with a fine nib, and he felt a distinct pride in knowing – without being able to see it – that an equally fine white vein marbled the water behind them too, like a physical marker of his presence back in the world. It was an endeavour the doubters had continually told him could never be, but they had underestimated him. He had already disproved every fact they laid at his feet, he had already beaten every target they set – and still it wasn’t enough for the naysayers who said he could never claim back what he had lost. He wasn’t a fool. He knew he couldn’t claw back time, nor the past. But to say his family was denied to him forever . . . No. They weren’t out of reach. They were tantalizingly close, and growing ever closer . . . He just had to keep believing, keep showing them he was the man they used to love. He wasn’t less now. He was the man he had been before.
He felt his spirits begin to soar as they sailed for miles in contented quiet through the beautiful desolation of the Baltic, cutting and sluicing, tacking and gybing beneath a soundless symphony of blues. He felt warily happy. It was an alien emotion these days, where pain and loneliness and frustration defined his days. But out here, he was in his element. In the rest of his life, he had to pitch himself against the odds, but out on the water, he merely had to do battle with the elements. It was an arena where he rarely won, of course, and yet he wished he could stay there for days, escape into the solace of an empty sea and feel his hair fly back and his eyes stream, the spray on his face. This was where he felt most alive. Most awake.
In front and above him, the mainsail was bellied out, taut and curved into a perfect half-ellipse as the keel tore through the water, slicing the sea as though skating over glass, until ahead, creeping into view, came the fractured embrace of the next group of skerries. He approached the ragged scraps of land with masterly ease, the specks of rock breaking up the pristine