An island. A tiny island, roughly the same size and shape as a circus tent, but an island nonetheless.
‘Hey!’ he yelled after the disappearing kid. ‘Hey wait!’ But the kid wasn’t waiting. Bobby took hold of the boom and began to pull himself and his raft along its length, slowly towards the island.
There was something odd about its appearance that he couldn’t quite pin down. There didn’t seem to be any vegetation, but that wasn’t it. Closer now, he saw that its shape was more like a giant fried egg: very flat – almost to the waterline – but with a raised centre which at first he’d taken for its entirety. He could make out the scribbled line of a cooking fire’s smoke and see tiny shapes of other human beings. People to talk to. People who would know where he was and possibly give him some clue about how he had got here. Maybe even how to get home – assuming he could remember where home was.
He hauled faster.
Soon he saw, coming towards him along the boom, a small boat. Presumably the boy had run to tell the islanders of the strange man who had appeared in their waters, and someone had come out to investigate. He’d like to have thought they were planning to welcome him with garlands of flowers, pit-roasted suckling pig and an army of hula-dancing virgins, but the island really didn’t look that big at all, and they were just as likely to see him as a threat. He slowed down, and as the small boat appeared made sure that his fishing spear was close to hand.
It was a shabby-looking affair – clinker-built from overlapping boards of different sizes and with a sail which was a patchwork confection of a hundred different types of fabric, all ragged and sun-bleached. He was unsurprised to see the name painted on her bow was Tatterdemalion II. The woman captaining it was powering her craft along the boom using skilful strokes of a long gaff-hook. She had one passenger: a black man wearing a plaid shirt and a fishing hat, who sat in the stern with a baseball bat slung across his shoulders. Muscle in case Bobby turned out to be trouble. Given how weak he was, Bobby would have laughed, but he didn’t think he even had the strength for that. The woman’s arms were bare, her face a lean and tanned fortysomething under a wide-brimmed hat, and as she got closer, he found himself the subject of a shrewd, narrow-eyed regard from eyes which were exactly the same colour as the hammer-bright sky. She held off a couple of yards, watching.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ he said, dismayed at the croaking sound of his own voice. ‘You have no idea.’
‘Some, maybe,’ she replied. Her accent was American, somewhere northern, if he was any judge. ‘Not a bad job,’ she added, nodding at his raft, with its shelter and its neatly coiled driftlines and its little piles of carefully organised salvage. ‘How long were you out there?’
‘Four days? Maybe five?’
She nodded. ‘Mm-hm. Lucky.’
‘Not exactly the first word that springs to mind.’
‘Maybe. But then by the time some drifters reach us they’ve been dead for so long that they’re basically mummies.’
‘Well fair enough then.’
‘Sometimes they’ve just gone batshit crazy from the heat and think they’re hallucinating. Sometimes they get violent. You’re not going to get violent on me, are you?’
‘Absolutely not, ma’am,’ he answered.
‘In which case I think we’re going to get along just fine. I will look after that, though, if you don’t mind.’ She nodded at his spear, and he handed it over. She gaffed her boat closer and lashed a length of rope between them with quick, sure hands. ‘But call me ma’am again and I’ll use your nuts for floats, got it? It’s Allie.’
‘As in…?’
‘As in Allie, smartass.’
‘Bobby Jenkins. As in Robert Andrew Michael.’ He offered his hand, and she shook it, amused.
‘Pleased to meet you, Bobby Jenkins.’ She indicated the black man, who as yet hadn’t said a word or cracked a smile. ‘This is Sebastian. Welcome to Stray.’
2
He let her tow him to the island, and he soon realised what was wrong with it. There were no trees, no bushes, no rocks, and no surf. Not even any sand. The boom that they were following ran straight up to a jetty, which became part of the island’s structure: timber, driftwood, assorted flotsam, and the jammed-together remains of dozens and dozens of small boats.
Stray was itself one huge raft.
It was roughly circular and must have been a good couple of hundred yards in diameter. Mostly it was flat to the waterline, climbing towards the centre in a jumbled ziggurat of planks and crates, giving the impression that the people who lived here had reached the limit of what they could effectively build and had resorted to simply piling stuff up in the middle to keep it out of the way. The other islanders were standing on the beach – he supposed he should really be calling it a deck – waving and calling. Half a dozen adults and one child – the Jesus lizard kid. Living here.
‘About now lots of questions will be occurring to you,’ said Allie. ‘They’ll all get answered,’ and she added something under her breath which sounded like ‘one way or another’. Louder, she continued: ‘Everybody will be falling over themselves to make you welcome. But you know how it is on a raft, you have to ration things to survive. My advice? Don’t give away too much too soon. And don’t be all in a rush.’
They were nearly at the jetty, and people were running forward with ropes and poles and cries of welcome. After nearly a week of trying to keep his balance on something with all the stability of a space-hopper, his legs weren’t used to anything which didn’t rock, and he stumbled as they helped him aboard. A middle-aged man with a welcome-mat of white belly hair above his explorer’s shorts and sandals caught Bobby’s arm and steadied him.
‘Easy, son,’ he said. His accent was Scottish. ‘Let’s get you under cover and get some breakfast into you.’
They took him to a place sheltered from the sun by an overhead screen of woven kelp fronds which looked just like camouflage netting – underneath, crude benches and hammocks surrounded an open fire supported safely above the wooden deck by an iron grill resting on large stones. Set in the coals was a frying pan roughly the same size as a snow-shovel, and from it sizzled a mouth-wateringly familiar smell.
‘My god,’ he breathed in wonder. ‘How did you get bacon?’
‘It’s not bacon,’ replied the older man. ‘It’s a fish, like most of everything else we eat here. They taste of all kinds of things. You’d be surprised.’
‘What kind of fish tastes like bacon?’
The black man plonked down next to him with a plateful. ‘We call him – wait for it – the bacon-fish,’ he said in a heavy French accent, and laughed. ‘Le poisson de la ventreche!’
‘Sheer coincidence,’ added Allie drily.
‘Stuart Lachlan’, the older man introduced himself. ‘My wife, Marjorie.’ He indicated a meerkat-like woman in a wraparound sarong who flapped and bustled about, bringing Bobby a wooden plate heaped with food and a bamboo cup of the coldest, sweetest water he’d ever tasted in his life. There was flat, unleavened bread which he wrapped around the bacon-fish like a big tortilla and topped with a generous helping of something that looked suspiciously like pickled kelp. Never mind the taste; his body craved greens.
‘Careful there,’ warned the older woman. ‘Don’t make yourself sick.’ But even as she said so she was smiling with maternal self-satisfaction. He wolfed it down and then had two more. ‘We have porridge too, if you like.’
‘Porridge.’ He shook his head in disbelief.
‘Made from kelp roots,’ explained Allie. ‘It’s actually more disgusting than it sounds.’
‘Allie and Sebastian you’ve already met,’ Lachlan continued. ‘And my son Jophiel is around here somewhere. I’ll send him along in a bit when you’re rested, and he’ll give you the grand tour. We don’t mean to crowd you. Come on, you lot, chop chop,’ he said to the others, clapping hi
s hands. ‘There’s work to be done.’
‘Wait a second,’ Allie interrupted. ‘What about Sophie?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Lachlan replied tetchily. ‘I’m sure that Sophie will let us know if and when she’s interested in meeting our new guest. Seb, we’ve got that spar on Down to patch up, remember? Allie, will you please find that fish-brained son of mine and remind him that he has a job to do?’
‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘see there again, you’ve gone and mistaken me for the nanny. No, it’s okay,’ she added hastily as he started to object. ‘I’ll round up your little sprat. I have to get a present for our new arrival anyway.’ She tipped Bobby a wink and sauntered off. He wasn’t too starved and exhausted to notice that she had a great figure for a woman of her age. Hell, a woman half her age. She returned quickly, presenting him with something which he could well understand was a luxury in this place: an orange. He consumed down to pith and rind and finally sat back, feeling uncomfortably stuffed and loving it.
‘This place is incredible,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to sound rude.’
‘See, anybody but an Englishman would have taken that as gratitude. Do you mean, how can we have flour, fruit, that kind of stuff in a place like this?’
He nodded.
‘Rationing, remember?’ Her mouth smiled, but her sky-coloured eyes widened fractionally in warning. ‘Anyway, I’ve brought your guide.’ She ushered forward the Lachlan’s boy, Joe, who was dripping wet and holding an offering of his own. Bobby took it: an oyster.
‘Um, thanks.’
‘Well open it then!’ The boy was bouncing with excitement.
‘I, uh, I don’t think I’ve ever opened one of these before.’
Joe tutted, obviously disgusted at a grown-up being unable to do such a simple thing as open an oyster. ‘Give it here, then.’ He took it back and produced a short-bladed knife which he inserted between the two halves of the shell and levered them apart in a single deft motion, then returned the oyster to Bobby. ‘Now, open it!’
Bobby did so, and was astonished to find, nestled in the oyster’s flesh, a pearl the size of a marble. ‘My God,’ he breathed.
‘Yeah, he does that a lot,’ yawned Allie. ‘Says he can smell them out.’
‘What do they smell like?’ Bobby asked him.
Joe stared at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Pearls,’ he said. ‘Do you like it?’
‘In all honesty, it’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my life.’
The boy beamed.
‘I wouldn’t go encouraging him,’ she warned. ‘Not unless you want to be eating oyster soup for the next month. Anyway,’ she gathered up her things and turned to go, ‘have fun, you two. Don’t get lost or killed.’
‘We’ll do our very best,’ Bobby promised.
3
It took them half an hour to walk the circumference of Stray, with Jophiel stopping every so often to point out something or perform one of the many chores which a place like this obviously demanded. The outermost rim was a wide, flat platform called the Dock; it bristled with jetties, spars, lines, creels, buoys, and a hundred other things Bobby had no name for and whose function he could only guess at. Here, drying on racks in the full open blaze of the sun, were long strands of kelp which Joe explained were used to make thatching for their shelters and cordage for their ropes and lines. It was also the same kelp that produced those sap-filled floats, and he saw dozens of them stored in baskets in the water.
‘That’s my job,’ he said proudly. ‘I harvest it because I’m the best diver. It’s like a forest under there – you should see it!’
‘You are definitely the best diver I have ever seen,’ said Bobby, and the boy glowed with pride. ‘But I’m going to take your word for it.’
The centre of Stray – which Joe told him was called simply the Hub – rose up in a jumbled construction which looked to Bobby like someone had tried to build a scale model of a Mayan temple out of offcuts from a sawmill. Its flat top was over thirty feet high, and the stepped sides were raucous with seagulls. Amazingly, tufts of wiry grass grew in the caked mess of their guano, some bearing tiny white flowers. All around it, split lengths of bamboo formed an elaborate scaffolding of gutters and downpipes to channel rainwater run-off into wooden barrels, and built up against its lower slopes were thatched-kelp roofs sheltering workspaces, storage, and the Strays’ living quarters. Underneath one of them, Allie was sitting with a fishing net spread out in front of her, fixing holes with a large wooden needle and humming to herself. She looked up as they passed.
‘Showing you the sights, is he? What do you make of it so far?’
‘This place is amazing,’ he replied.
‘Aw shucks, this ain’t nuthin’,’ she drawled. ‘You should see our big place out in the country.’
He laughed.
‘Well go on, scoot,’ she shooed them off. ‘Some of us have got work to do. We don’t need being distracted by handsome strangers stopping to gossip.’
As they moved on, Joe said: ‘I think she likes you.’
‘Really?’ Bobby looked back, watching her sure hands working and her long legs gleaming brown in the sun. ‘You think I have a chance there?’
Joe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m only twelve.’
‘And how old were you when you came here?’
‘Oh, I was born here,’ he replied, as if it were of no significance.
‘Born here?’ The Lachlans had been here that long? It was incredible, especially since they must have been in their fifties when Joe was born – not an easy time to become parents under the best of circumstances. Biologically improbable. ‘That’s a long time for anyone to be stuck here.’
Joe shrugged. ‘It doesn’t feel like it.’ Then, as if moving at the snail’s pace of an adult had become too much of an effort, he darted off the left and out onto another of those long booms which stretched into the ocean. ‘We’ve got four of these,’ he called. ‘This is Up, because it points to where the sun comes up in the morning. On the other side is Down, because…’
‘It’s where the sun goes down?’
‘Right! You’ll never guess what the other two are called.’
‘North and South?’
‘Nope.’
‘Left and Right?’
‘Nope-nope-nope,’ he sang, dancing on the boom.
‘I don’t know, then. Fred and Ginger?’
‘Why would anybody call a boom Fred?’
‘Well go on then, tell me.’
‘That one over there,’ he pointed, ‘is Strange, and the last one is Charm.’
‘Because that makes so much more sense.’
‘You fetched up on Strange.’
‘That actually does make sense.’ The names snagged on a splinter of memory at the back of his mind, but a more obvious question demanded attention first: ‘What are they for?’
‘They catch stuff that we can use. They have nets and lines hanging down into the water. Mostly it’s fish, but there’s a lot of rubbish floating around that we use for fixing up bits of Stray, building things, cooking. Boring stuff, you know.’
Far out towards the end of the boom, he could see the tiny shape of a boat, which was presumably where Lachlan and Seb were out making repairs. ‘I bet they take a lot of fixing. One storm and a few big waves could do a lot of damage, probably.’
‘Oh, we don’t get storms here. This part of the sea is called the Flats. There’s hardly any wind and no strong currents – things just sort of hang around here. The sea is as flat as a flounder most of the time.’
‘So the booms catch food and whatever flotsam drifts your way – and there must be a fair bit of it by the look of things – but where does it all come from?’
Joe shrugged. Clearly it wasn’t a question which interested him. ‘I don’t know. The Islands, probably.’
<
br /> ‘Islands.’
‘The Tourmaline Archipelago. The Flats is right in the middle of it.’ He counted off various points of the compass. ‘Drava is that way, Elbaite is way over in the other direction, Schorl is somewhere there, I think, and then further out there’s Blent, Lesser Odsae, Greater Odsae, the Carcanet Reefs…’
‘Wait – you mean islands with people, and boats, and, well, people?’
‘Of course! Where do you think all this rubbish comes from?’
‘But I thought – I assumed – that you were all stranded here.’
Joe considered this. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m sure if we were, then Da would know and he’d do something about it.’
‘Then why are you all still here, for God’s sake? Why haven’t you got yourselves off this thing and gone to live somewhere where you don’t have to drink bloody seaweed juice to stay alive? Why haven’t you all gone home?’
With the simple, inescapable logic of a child, Joe answered: ‘But this is our home.’
Bobby squinted at the horizon, but the glare made it impossible to see the shapes of any islands which might be lurking in the distance. He looked up at the Hub. ‘How do I get up there?’
Joe looked uneasy. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
‘I think it’s an astoundingly good idea. Why, is it dangerous or something? Don’t tell me that’s your Holy Mountain.’
‘That’s the Top. Da says that it’s dangerous and that I should never climb up there.’
Bobby looked up at the ramshackle height of it again. ‘He may well have a point, at that. Look, don’t worry. I’m going to be very careful. I just want to see if I can get a decent view of those Islands you mentioned from on top of there.’
‘You won’t. They’re too far away.’
‘That may be true, but I’d still like to not see it with my own eyes.’
‘But Da said I had to show you around myself.’ Bobby watched Joe’s gaze crawl reluctantly to the top of the peak and knew that he was genuinely fearful of getting in trouble.
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