Whiskey & Charlie by Annabel Smith Read Free Book Online

entertainments: at fifteen, they were too old for the children’s activities and too young for the adults’. Once the novelty had worn off, Charlie grew tired of swimming, and of table tennis, which Whiskey almost always won. They had watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the ship’s cinema so many times that they could quote entire scenes verbatim. They had even worked their way through the board games in the lounge, Yahtzee, Monopoly, and Guess Who?, games they had long since outgrown but that filled a few hours in which they had nothing better to do.
    Charlie tracked their progress on a map so small that their entire journey was barely longer than his index finger. Through the blue-black reaches of the Atlantic they crawled, following the coast of Portugal as it curved toward the Mediterranean Sea, through the Strait of Gibraltar and south of Sicily to Crete, where they spent the day. Then there was the slow and eerie journey through the narrow Suez Canal into the Red Sea, a day in Djibouti, and then at last into the Indian Ocean.
    From Djibouti to Perth, Western Australia, took a whole week, seven long days in which there was nothing to see from the promenade deck except water and sky, water and sky, and if it weren’t for the huge waves, slapping relentlessly against the hull of the ship, Charlie would have sworn they weren’t moving at all. The deck was bare, the dining room empty; everyone was seasick, sweating and moaning in their cabins until the whole ship smelled of vomit and disinfectant. Charlie found himself curiously immune to the rough seas, wandering the stairwells and walkways alone, wondering if they would ever see land again.
    One day Sanju took pity on him and led him off for an unofficial tour of the bridge.
    â€œAsk how deep it is,” their father said from his bunk when he found out where Charlie was going. Even in the midst of his seasickness, he was still collecting facts about the voyage.
    Charlie could have spent all day in the control room. He was fascinated by the navigational instruments, the vast panel of buttons and switches and levers, the screens that flashed and beeped constantly, continually updating their speed, their latitude and longitude, the temperature of the air outside, and the surface temperature of the water, the direction and speed of the wind. When Charlie asked about the depth, the first officer showed him the echo sounder equipment, explained how it sent a beam of sound through the water to the ocean floor and gauged the distance by the time it took the echo of that sound to return.
    â€œTell your dad,” he said, “that the deepest part of the Indian Ocean is the Java Trench, four and a half miles deep, give or take a few feet.”
    x x x
    Lying in his bunk that night, listening to the drone of the engine, Charlie remembered something his history teacher, Mr. Carr, had said on the first day of the school term the year before.
    â€œBattle of Hastings, what was the date?” he had asked before they had even opened their notebooks. Hands had gone up cautiously, dreading the outcome; surely they weren’t getting tested on the first day of term.
    â€œHenry the Eighth’s wives: What were their names? How did he get rid of them?” Hands went up; hands went down.
    â€œWho. Thinks. That. Makes. History?”
    There was a sigh of relief. All hands went down. Not a test—a rhetorical question. In fact, not even a question but a paragraph, each word a separate sentence, with the same meaning: how little you know. Mr. Carr rolled the blackboard down to reveal the quote he had written there, read it aloud to make sure no one missed it: “History is nothing more than the thin thread of what is remembered, stretched out over the ocean of what has been forgotten.”
    â€œUntil you understand that,” Mr. Carr said, “you’ll never be a historian.”
    Charlie had written it down, because he was that kind of