Canal Dreams

It took her two trips to bring all the weaponry down to the boat. She topped up the outboard fuel tank with one of the jerry cans on the pontoon, then stowed that with the missile launchers and explosives in the bottom of the inflatable and restarted the engine.

She pushed the Gemini away from the pontoon. The inflatable purred off into the night, taking a curving course towards the bulky rectangular shape of the Nakodo.

Her mother kept a scrapbook. It glossed over the time she was in hospital. Sometimes when she was home she would look through the scrapbook when her mother wasn't there. The pages flipped through her fingers; the glued-in programmes with her name in them, the cuttings from papers mentioning her individually, a few cassette inserts, some magazine interviews and features, and as the pages slipped and sped and fell through her hands she thought that the times the heavy pages covered had themselves gone just as fast, just as suddenly and inevitably.

The years mounted up, like a sentence. She played, and her modest fame grew. She tried a few more times to board a plane, from single-engine Cessnas to 747 s, but could not ever suffer the doors to be closed. She got as far as Okinawa for a couple of holidays, and went to Korea for the Olympics and a few concerts, but pressure of work stopped her from making sea journeys that lasted any longer. There was talk once, by a Greek ship owner impressed with her playing, of her string quartet playing on board a luxury cruise ship for anything up to a year; state rooms, good money, and a world cruise… but she visited one of the cruise ships in Yokohama and decided she didn't much like the people, the decor or the idea of being expected to play the safe, predictable music that seemed to be expected of her. So it came to nothing.

She grew to know Japan well; the places she didn't go to with the orchestra she visited alone, on her frequent vacations. Mr Moriya fretted that she wasn't maximising her potential, which she took to mean making all the money she could, but then she scarcely knew what to do with what she did have. She paid off the loan on the Stradivarius, bought a house in the hills above Kamakura, which cost a fortune, and had long since paid the loan on her mother's little apartment, but she didn't know what else to do. Driving didn't interest her; she always had a small Ronda, but hated the crowded roads and was always relieved to get out of the machine. She felt awkward and conspicuous in very expensive clothes, and couldn't see the point of jewellery you worried about. She saved, for want of anything better to do, and thought vaguely about founding a school in her later years.

Mr Moriya decided she was right to go for quality rather than quantity, and renegotiated her contract with the orchestra. She started to ration public appearances, and only recorded when she absolutely had to. Western music critics who heard her made flattering comparisons; she thought about going to Europe but kept putting it off. She was looking forward to travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but it seemed like something she should do only once each way (to reduce it to some sort of absurdist commuter journey each year would seem like sacrilege), and was anyway nervous of actually playing in Europe. At first she had worried that nobody would want to listen to her, then, when it became clear they did, that she'd been built up too highly, and they'd be disappointed. Mr Moriya, to her surprise, didn't try to pressure her into going. He seemed content to let the offers mount up, the venues increase in size, and the proposed money inflate.

She fell into the music, whenever she played. It was real; colourful. Her life, for all the friends and holidays and for all the respect of other musicians and adulation of audiences, seemed, if not actually monochrome, then missing some vital component; as if one colour was missing, one gun in the set misfiring, so infecting the image with its absence.

One day she trudged through the woods north of Fuji, taking the old path she'd first travelled as little more than a child, struggling with her water-warped and salt-stained cello and case.

When she got to the bald summit of the hill, the little clearing where she'd watched Fuji dance in the flames she'd made, she discovered it had become a picnic area; half a dozen smiling, chattering families sat at stout wooden tables, unpacking boxes, spreading dishes, opening bottles, taking their rubbish to cheerfully bright plastic bins which said 'Thank you' when you fed them. Children's laughter filled the place, and smoke from a portable barbecue wavered like some incipient genie. in front of the view of Fuji. Western pop music tinkled from a ghetto blaster hanging from a tree.

She turned and walked away, and never went there again.

She was halfway across the kilometre of dark water between the Nadia and the Nakodo when the radio came alive in her trouser pocket. The noise startled her, made her let go of the throttle, clutch at her thigh where the speech was coming from. She pulled the radio out.

'-hey; Sucre…? She let the Gemini's engine idle, looked round at the lights of the ships. 'Arturo, Arturo… La Nadia, 'allo? Yo, venceristas en La Nadia… muchachos? It was Dandridge's voice, chuckling. Despertad vosotros!

She heard other voices in the background. More Spanish, too quick for her to follow. Eventually; 'Sucre; anybody. Hello. Hello? God damn it, you guys. Hello. Hello! Hello! Jesus- The radio went dead. She looked round to the lights of the Nakodo.

She switched the engine off. It was very quiet.

She remembered the nightscope on the AK47 she'd taken from Sucre's cabin, lifted the gun and sighted.

The view of the Nakodo's hull was dim grey and grainy. There was no movement on the deck or in the bridge, though it was hard to tell in the bridge because the lights there were almost too bright for the nightsight. She dropped the sight, watched the pontoon and the steps down to it. Still nothing. She kept watching, and kept checking the radio, thinking she had somehow turned it off Then she heard something, behind her.

She swung, steadied the sight on the Nadia. She swept the ship, stem to stern, and found a Gemini, heading round from the rear of the ship, making for the pontoon. One man; that was all she could see.

She put the gun down, started the engine up again, and swung the inflatable back, towards the Nadia.

She kept checking with the rifle nightsight, in case whoever was in the Gemini approaching the ship showed any signs of having heard — or seen — her, but the inflatable just motored on, slowing, for the pontoon she'd left a few minutes earlier. She was a couple of hundred metres away from the Nadia when the other boat docked. One man got out. She saw him raise one arm to his face.

'Here, said the radio. The man hefted a rifle, started up the steps towards the Nadia's deck. She kept on motoring towards the ship. She was watching the single figure climb towards the top of the steps when he stopped. He looked down towards the pontoon. The view she had was made shaky by the progress of her own boat through the waves. She let go the throttle; the Gemini coasted forward, dropping and dying in the water. The man brought something up from his waist. 'Wait, said the radio. 'The Gemini; the other one. Did anybody — ? She saw him raise something else to his face; to his eyes; held like a pair of binoculars. He looked down, then out, sca

She had to look to find the safety, flicked it and resighted. The rifle filled the world with sound; the sight flared with the gun's own flame. 'Holy sh- the radio said again.