I stormed down into the hold where the brothers were snoring in their hammocks. The provisions were kept in large wooden crates, roped down and braced between the ribs, and divided into their various purposes: dry stores, fruit and vegetables, water. I pawed through them all until I found what I was looking for: a few small crates of bottles and two casks. The noise of my search must have woken the convicts, because I could hear their exchange in the darkness behind me.

‘What’s she doin, Dec?’

‘Ah, Christ a’mighty, the booze.’

They were powerless to intervene but they cursed me loud enough to ensure I’d hear. I took a crate and struggled up the stairway with it in my arms, banging on every step. When I got onto the deck I staggered to the rail and heaved it into the sea. Past my father, who did not miss the tell-tale clinking and splashing.

He turned his face my way, muttered the usual tired refrain about the serpent’s tooth.

‘We’re not going back for that,’ I spat.

I went back to the hold and repeated the process until I had removed every bottle I could find. The liar! Of course we were carrying booze. I watched the casks bob away into the darkness, took out some of the individual bottles and flung them as hard as I could, aiming them at the bobbing casks. It felt satisfying, as if I had lanced something that afflicted both my father and me.

He resorted to that stage of his bingeing that I knew well, sitting there mournfully on the deck, a blanket around his shoulders now, berating me. The waste! The waste! I had no idea about life at sea. I was a harpy, a shrew. This (whatever it was) is what happens when you take women to sea. My mother would be turning in her grave, oh, mark my words.

He didn’t seem to be flagging, which was a worry. Normally by this stage he’d have woe-betided himself to sleep.

The frustration overtook me and I screamed, or shouted, I don’t know, somewhere close to his face. It was the piling-up of everything: the ingratitude, the obstinacy, the insults, all of it. And for just a brief instant I thought I’d discharged the accumulated rancour. But his reaction robbed me of even that small pleasure. His expression shifted rapidly from bafflement to distress and he lowered his head.

‘How many times,’ I asked him. ‘How many times must we re-enact this? Does it just go on this way until we both flag out and die?’

‘Oh what, what? There is no re-enactment.’ He swept his hands across the boards of the deck as though he wanted to draw a moat around himself. ‘This is my life now, this is yours. No love in it. God’s abandoned us and here we are.’