Abraham whimpers a little beside me, as if feeling my pain. ‘It’s all right, boy. Let’s go home.’
I put some biscuits out for Abraham and drink some vodka and sing Carly Simon’s ‘Coming Around Again’, repeating the title of the song until I think I’m going insane.
Seeing there is ten minutes before I must call Hendrich I click on YouTube and type in ‘Sol Davis’. I find footage of waves and a man in a wetsuit on a board, carving his way across the water.
It cuts to this same man coming out of the water and walking over the sand, addressing the camera, with a smile but also a frown, and he shakes his head.
‘Hey, man, don’t do anything with that,’ he says. He has an Australian accent and his head is shaven and he looks, in normalterms, nearly twenty years older but there is no doubt about it: it is Omai. I freeze the frame. His eyes stare straight at me, his forehead beaded with saltwater.
I pick up the phone, cradle it in my hand, go into ‘Recents’ and press my thumb on ‘H’.
Hendrich answers.
‘All right, Hendrich. I’ll do it.’
PART FIVE
The Return
Plymouth, England, 1768
The story of how I met Omai began on a rainy Tuesday in March on the cobbles of Plymouth harbour. I was hungover. I was always hungover in Plymouth. Well, either hungover or drunk. It was a wet place. Rain, sea, ale. It felt like everyone was slowly drowning.
When I found Captain Samuel Wallis, I recognised him from the portrait I had seen hanging in the Guildhall. He was wearing his fine royal blue coat and walking along the jetty, deep in conversation with another man.
I had arrived in Plymouth only a month before. At this time my hope seemed to ebb ever further out to sea. I had stopped believing in ever finding my daughter and instead I found myself trying to solve the riddle that plagued me: what is the point of living when you have no one to live for? I still had no answer to that. I think, looking back, I was suffering from a kind of depression.
I ran over to him, to Wallis, and stood in front of his path, walking backwards as he walked forwards.
‘I heard you were a man short,’ I said. ‘For the voyage. On theDolphin.’
The men carried on walking. Captain Wallis looked at me. He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. Short, pudgy, purple-cheeked. A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring. And yet he was only two years away from having an island named after him. In the meantime, his small green eyes viewed me with disdain.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, in a deep snorting kind of voice.
‘John Frears.’ It was the first time I had ever said that name.
Captain Wallis’ companion lightly touched his arm. A quiet gesture but one which did its purpose. This man seemed very different to Mr Wallis. Sharp-eyed but with a kind mouth, his lips curling at their edges with interest. He was wearing a coal-black coat despite the weather. This was Tobias Furneaux, a man I would get to know quite well over the years. Both men now stopped still amid the busy harbour, near crates of speckled grey freshly killed fish, shining in the June sunlight. ‘And why should we have you on our vessel?’
‘I have skills, good sirs, that might be wanting elsewhere.’
‘Like what?’ asked Mr Furneaux.
I dug deep into my bag and took out my black wooden three-holed galoubet and put it to my lips. I began to play a few notes of a folk tune, ‘The Bay of Biscay’.
‘You play the pipe well,’ said Mr Furneaux, suppressing a smile.
‘I can also play the mandolin.’ I didn’t mention the lute, obviously. It would have been like, these days, saying you could use a fax machine in a job interview. It simply wasn’t something people did any more.
Mr Furneaux was impressed, and said something along those lines.
‘Hmm,’ said Mr Wallis, humming a more doubtful tune and turning to his companion. ‘We are not arranging a concert, Mr Furneaux.’
Mr Furneaux inhaled the damp air sharply. ‘If I may be so bold, Mr Wallis, I would like to proffer that musical ability is an invaluable skill on long voyages such as ours.’
‘I have other skills too, sir,’ I said, addressing Mr Wallis.
He gave me a quizzical look.
