Making It Up by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online

boats coming down into the heaving sea. And so it was that she saw one boat tip up at one end and hang there crookedly with people falling out, dark shapes pitching into the water. And another smashed into the side of the ship—planks flew apart and dropped, people were falling again, and then down in the water there were heads bobbing, and someone trying to get into the broken boat. She sat rigid, watching; suddenly there were lights—the emergency lights on the decks must have come on—and you could clearly see figures moving about, and piling into the boats that still hung up there.
    The lascars were struggling to get the boat away from the side of the ship, pulling frantically on the oars. They managed to open up quite a gap, and then there was a surge that washed them back toward the hull. Up above, another boat was just starting the descent, packed with people. It swung, lurched, and then crashed hard into the side. Someone fell—Shirley saw the tumbling body, only yards away. There were other things falling—ropes, bits of wood—and then an oar came crashing down into their boat.
    It knocked several people off their seats. There was screaming. The officer was shouting to the lascars to pull harder.
    Jean was sitting close up against Shirley. The oar caught her on the side of the head; she fell across Shirley’s lap like a little rag doll.
    Shirley clung on to the child. She lifted her up on her knees and cradled her head in the crook of her arm. She couldn’t see or feel blood, but she knew that Jean was unconscious. The people who had been knocked into the well of the boat were trying to get back onto their seats; someone was moaning “My arm—oh, my arm.”
    The lascars had opened up a gap at last. There was clear water between the boat and the side of the ship, but it was water littered with debris, with people in life jackets, with bobbing heads. A lifeboat had capsized, Shirley now saw; everyone in it had been thrown into the water. There were flares going up from the ship—amber, red, and white distress flares that threw a momentary lurid light on the sea, and lit up the blackness of the sky.
    She held Jean. She ran her fingers around her head and could feel a bump now, and the stickiness of blood, but there didn’t seem to be much. It hadn’t been so very hard a bang—surely she would be all right? A woman on the bench behind was saying that she thought her arm was broken. Shirley could see Mrs. Leech, leaning up against Mrs. Clavering, looking dazed; she wanted to tell her about Jean, but could only have done so by shouting across the people in between.
    They were getting farther from the ship all the time. The shapes of other lifeboats were dotted about on the sea, all trying to pull away from the ship. The seamen were flashing torches, to keep in contact. There were figures still visible on the ship, moving about on the deck, and a lifeboat coming down; Shirley thought she could make out the shapes of two or three more, hanging there waiting to go. What was happening seemed to have been going on for hours, but she realized that in fact it had only been minutes—half an hour, perhaps—since they left the cabin, since they made their way up to the deck, since the torpedo hit them. The second torpedo—because she now knew that the first one must have been when they were still asleep, when her dream had seemed to roar and heave.
    Where was he? Where was Alan Baker? She stared at the listing ship, and she knew that he was still there, still on board, because he would have been helping the soldiers to get up on deck, those men without a foot or a leg, or unable to see, and he would not leave until the very last one of them was on a lifeboat.
    She looked down at Jean. Her eyelids seemed to flutter, which must be a good sign, and Shirley could feel her breathing. They were well away from the ship now, and the lascars were resting on their oars; the