Read Wolves for Free Online Page B

Look – like paint over wet putty.’
    ‘Maybe it’s not the fibreglass at all,’ she says, running her small brown hands over her arms. She sees me looking. ‘It could be the sand blowing in from the dunes,’ she says. She rubs her hands against her jeans, cleaning off imaginary grit.
    Michel tells me that to wake sore and stiff from working long hours on the boat, to discuss practical things over a breakfast of coffee and processed bread, to come home sun-dazzled, their skins buzzing, and to work at their books silently and together – all this has added up to a life so clear-cut and so pure, it has begun to resemble a religious retreat.
    Hanna reminisces, ‘The deck was so waterlogged we had to strip it back to the ply in places. Whoever had it last drilled straight into the deck. Every hole is a sponge.’
    A stage laugh from Michel. ‘Thank God they never got around to resecuring the bulkheads! They’d have drilled straight through the hull.’
    We go indoors at last. We try to. The front door sticks; salt has swollen the wood. Tough grey grasses have taken root in the sand collecting under the porch. The blades are sticky and scaly, as though coated with powdered glass. While Hanna struggles to open the door, I bend to pluck a stem. It won’t give, and my fingers come away bloody.
    There is mould around the doorframe, damp in the corners of the ceiling, a mealy smell everywhere. The rooms have fibreboard walls. They give slightly if you lean on them. There are three rooms: bathroom, bedroom, living room. You step into the living room straight from the front door and at the back of the room is the kitchen. A thin brown carpet covers the living room floor. It peters out near the kitchen, where cork-effect vinyl floor tiles have begun to lift at the edges.
    ‘Would you like a drink?’ There is no shortage of drink. There are several kinds of gin. There is tonic, kept in the fridge, but no ice.
    ‘That’s fine.’ I take the G&T from her hand. ‘Terrific.’ It tastes disgusting, an extract of hedge clippings.
    Michel cracks open a can of lager and sits beside me on the sofa. I move over for him, my palms chilling on the nylon-mix fleece they’ve thrown over it. I’m cold at the core in here. I’m not shivering. My hands and feet are fine. This cold begins on the inside, deep in the pit of the lungs. A tubercular chill.
    Hanna sits opposite us on a seat made of cardboard boxes and polystyrene packing. Everything here is reused. Everything is repurposed. Gear fills their living room. Clothing in plastic storage tubs. Boots and waterproofs. Damp-bulged books and curling maps are piled on every flat surface. In this room as cramped as a cabin, heavy with gear, carefully organised yet still tipping into an unavoidable chaos, where the stowage succumbs to sheer weight and numbers, it is possible, I suppose, that they are conducting a dress-rehearsal for their voyage.
    ‘It’s American-built.’ Hanna fetches me yachting magazines from a pile on top of the fridge. Michel gets up and clatters about, ‘fixing some more drinks’. Hanna moves me to her chair made of boxes (‘the light is better here’) and drops the magazines into my lap. She hunkers down beside me and flicks from one dog-eared page to another, showing me pictures of boats similar to theirs, each with a slightly different rigging. We might be choosing shoes or handbags, except that the choices she makes now may make the difference between life and death. ‘This, you see; it’s a very heavy system.’
    Michel comes back with full glasses. He wriggles into the sofa’s damp and Hanna joins him there. They tuck the felty orange throw around themselves. Their hands dance and couple in the gloom. They’ve learned to compensate for their discomfort; they’ve made it cosy, made it theirs. They’re living through a little Fall here, ‘saving on bills’, taking baby steps in readiness for when the lights go off for real, forever, and the