Between Two Seas Read Online Free Page B

tight about my chest, squeezing my ribs, his breath on my cheek, stinking of fish and spirits.
    I cry out and try to thrust him away. I’m surprised how strong he is. He pulls me round to face him and for a moment I see his filthy, rotten teeth and cracked lips close to me before he clamps his mouth down upon mine so that I cannot make a sound. I twist my head and cry out, but he forces his mouth over mine again, poking his tongue into my mouth like a slimy raw fish. He has my arms pinned tightly to my sides, and I can’t make a sound. But I can move my legs, and I bring my right knee up sharply, and feel it thud into his groin. It was an instinctive move and for a moment it seems to have worked. He releases me and bends over with a groan. But as I start to back away, retching with disgust, he straightens up. Now his face is contorted with pain and rage, his lips curling back from his brown teeth. A wave of terror washes over me. He grabs me by the hair, yanking me towards him, and this time I scream, as loudly as I can.
    ‘Help!’ I yell. ‘Help me, please!’
    He twists my hair in his fingers, and slams me against the cabin wall. There is a singing in my ears. His free hand is on my breast, squeezing and pinching me painfully through the fabric of my gown. I try to scream again, but he pushes his mouth against mine to stop the sound, his teeth bruising my lips.
    ‘Torben!’
    I’m released so suddenly that I fall heavily against the table. Gasping with pain, I look up to see Jens’s furious face glaring into Torben’s. They stand facing each other, fists clenched, each trying to outface the other. It’s Torben who backs off, shuffling across the cabin to the ladder, with a shifty, backward glance. Jens barks an order at him. I don’t know what he is saying, but he’s making him leave and I’m thankful.
    Jens turns and offers to help me up, but I can’t bear to be touched at all now and shrink away from him. His freckled face looks sombre as he stands back.
    I drag myself to my feet, only to stagger as the boat lurches once more. Ignoring my protests, Jens grasps my arm and helps me to my bunk before I can fall again.
    ‘What did I do?’ I am asking myself more than Jens. ‘To make him think he could treat me like that?’ In my heart I already know the answer. I’ve come aboard this boat alone. I’m surrounded by men; no longer young enough to be seen as a child, but not yet adult enough to understand the dangers. So now he thinks I’m a whore. They said that about my mother too.
    ‘He’s disgusting!’ My voice shakes with loathing. I can taste blood on my lip where his teeth cut me.
    ‘Try to rest,’ Jens tells me. ‘I not let him trouble you again.’
    He turns to go, but then hesitates and turns back.
    ‘Bad storm coming,’ he tells me. ‘Stay here.’
    I nod, and lie on the bed racked with sobs. I weep for shame and anger. I weep for myself and my life and I weep for my mother. Eventually my sobs still. Fear takes the place of grief. I thought the motion of the boat had been dramatic during the past few days, but I now realize I was mistaken.
    The boat is being flung this way and that, shuddering violently as waves crash against her. The wind has risen to a howl above which I can hear the shouts of the crew only faintly. I wrap my blankets about me, shivering. There’s a particularly loud crash and the boat pauses and shudders violently before pitching forwards and then rolling so steeply that I am flung into the wall next to my bunk.
    Bracing myself against the pitching of the vessel, I remember my mother telling me the story of how my father came to her home.
    He’d been working on a freight ship in the North Sea and was heading up the Humber estuary for Grimsby when his ship met a storm. The ship was blown off course, to the south, and was wrecked on the coast at Mablethorpe. My mother’s father, my grandfather whom I have never met, found my father crawling out of the sea onto the