Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  ‘I won’t deny that we’ve had our share of misfortunes. Ours is a hard life.’

  ‘Joe also mentioned something about Islands,’ Bobby added.

  ‘Yes. The Tourmaline Archipelago. I’m sure he’s explained how it’s responsible for the flotsam which drifts to us through the Flats. We also trade with them for certain essentials – medicines and such-like. Please don’t get the wrong impression – we’re not like the Amish or anything silly like that. We just like to keep ourselves to ourselves.’

  But why haven’t any of you tried to go home? he wondered, though he suspected that it was a very prickly question indeed. ‘Exactly what islands are they?’ he asked. ‘I’ve done a bit of travelling in my time, and I’ve never heard that name before. What ocean are we in? From the climate, I’d say it feels like the Pacific, so maybe it’s somewhere in Polynesia, but…’ he left it hanging and shrugged.

  ‘He is called the Antaean Ocean,’ said Seb. ‘The giant with the world on his shoulders.’

  ‘I think that was Atlas,’ said Allie. Bobby was pretty sure it wasn’t the name of an ocean at all.

  ‘I’m afraid geography was never my strong suit,’ Lachlan replied vaguely. ‘Alison might have a better idea – my dear, when is the next supply run?’

  ‘Two weeks, give or take.’

  Lachlan turned back to Bobby. ‘Can you bear to stay with us for a fortnight before we pack you off on your merry way?’

  ‘It’d be a privilege,’ he replied, but his heart was dismayed. Two weeks? ‘I’ll try not to break anything while I’m here.’

  ‘Excellent. And who knows? By then you might have come to like this place so much that you decide to become a Stray.’

  Marjorie ladled out an extra bowl of stew. ‘I’ll just go and take Sophie hers, then, if you’ll all excuse me,’ she said and disappeared in the direction of the beaded curtain he’d noticed earlier.

  When she’d gone, Bobby said to Lachlan: ‘I take it Sophie doesn’t eat with the rest of you.’

  ‘By her own choice. Joe’s told you about her?’

  ‘A little. Something about trying to eat him.’

  Lachlan grimaced. ‘Sad and unfortunate. She was here when I arrived – had been alone for I don’t know how long. The stress, the isolation, who knows? There but for the grace of God, yes? Did you meet her on your tour?’

  ‘No. I get the impression she’s not keen on making new friends.’

  ‘Well, then. I’m sure she’ll introduce herself before too long. Try not to…’ he faltered. ‘Try not to judge the rest of us too harshly by what you see of her, yes?’ There was something in Lachlan’s expression – some uncomplicated, basic plea for compassion – that made Bobby soften his attitude to him. Lachlan was right; he shouldn’t judge these people so quickly. They’d had to cope with living conditions which would have killed most people, or at least driven them insane. He didn’t like to think how he’d have coped in their place.

  But you are in their place now, aren’t you Bobby? he told himself. At least for the next fortnight. Who knows what kind of state you’ll be in by then?

  The conversation broke up and people drifted away as night deepened. It turned out that they hadn’t been joking about him doing the washing-up.

  2

  Seb found him just as he was settling down to sleep, and with many secretive hushings led him to the other side of Stray, where Allie was sitting by a small but elaborate construction of rubber pipes and metal tubing. She was fiddling with it, turning a small tap; there was a gurgle of liquid, and she took a tentative sip at something in a bamboo beaker. She gasped and said something extraordinarily rude.

  ‘Try this,’ she whispered to Seb, who sat down beside her.

  He took a sip. ‘Merde-alors,’ he grunted, and passed the beaker to Bobby. ‘’Ere, this will put the hairs on your chest.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘About eighty per-cent proof,’ Allie gasped. ‘Jesus that’s rough.’

  It was a still. They were making hooch. ‘Outstanding,’ he said, and joined them.

  ‘We though maybe we wait for you to get more better,’ said Seb. ‘Then we figure, pfft, fuck it, eh?’

  Bobby sipped cautiously. He’d been caught out before by getting too blasé about the homebrew offered by friendly natives, but even so, what hit his mouth came as a shock. It tasted like salted antiseptic with a petroleum chaser, after which somebody had tossed in a lighted match.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he croaked. Seb was grinning and nodding insanely, while Allie lay on her back and blew cigarette smoke at the stars. ‘Seriously, what is this?’

  ‘Is a kind of vodka, we think. We make him from whatever come to ‘and – fruit peel, mostly seaweed. He has something of a kick, eh?’

  ‘There are laws against this kind of thing, you know.’

  ‘But now,’ Seb hunched forward, becoming even more animated, if such a thing were possible, ‘now we ‘ave you and your liquorice. Very clever, my friend, liquorice for bait. We can make Ouzo! Yes?’

  ‘Sure, ouzo, why not? It might do something about the aftertaste. You know, you really can taste the kelp.’

  They passed the beaker around again. Allie offered him a drag on her cigarette, but he declined. ‘More for me,’ she shrugged.

  As the burning in his throat subsided he said: ‘Don’t get me wrong, but it seems to me like the Lachlans wouldn’t be very approving if they knew about this, would they?’

  ‘Oh, they know,’ Allie answered. ‘They must do. You can’t hide something like this in a place so small. We pretend to hide it and they pretend not to know and everybody’s happy.’

  ‘Until you turn up for work shitfaced and hungover.’

  ‘Ah,’ she shook her head sadly. ‘Therein lies the greatest tragedy of our weird, floating existence, my friend. We do not have enough fresh water to spare for distilling the amount required to get shitfaced and hence hungover. We only have enough for the occasional nightcap.’

  ‘A snifter,’ added Seb. ‘It is a word, yes?’

  ‘It is a word,’ she confirmed sagely. ‘And also, to toast the arrival of new weird floaters. To our new friend Bobby Jenkins.’ She held the beaker aloft. ‘God bless him and all who sail in him. Chin chin, old bean.’

  ‘Salut!’

  And the beaker went around again.

  After a while the nerve-endings in his mouth and throat became too traumatised to communicate the full horror of what they were experiencing to his brain, and he got quite a nice little buzz which followed him back to his hammock and into sleep.

  Chapter 7

  The Cinderella Curfew

  1

  As Steve slipped into the taxi seat beside Vessa, she was already giving her address to the driver, and they pulled away.

  ‘So you need to be home by midnight,’ he said. ‘A bit like Cinderella, then.’ As much as anything else, he wanted to distract her from her evident anxiety – repeatedly checking her watch and peering ahead at the traffic – no matter how inane his chatter.

  ‘Not really. Cinderella had to leave the ball by midnight. This is an entirely different thing.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  She glanced at him warily.

  ‘Honestly. You asked me to help. This is me helping. I listen.’

  ‘One joke and I will kick you out of this thing, I swear.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Okay then,’ she relented. ‘At midnight I fall asleep. Every night, like clockwork, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. Spark out, like that.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Which, as you can imagine, caused a few awkward situations before I worked out what was going on. Then, at six o’clock the following morning,’ she snapped her fingers again, ‘Good Morning Britain. Just think of it as a weird kind of epilepsy, if you like.’

  ‘Wow
,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yeah. Wow.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention anything earlier, like at dinner?’

  She cocked her head on one side and looked at him.

  ‘Okay, stupid question. Sorry.’

  11:31

  Streetlights and headlights threw mutating oblongs of light across the cab’s ceiling as they drove south out of the city centre towards Selly Oak, the University, and student country. Each time they had to slow for traffic or signals he found himself getting edgier and edgier on her behalf.

  ‘Oh, one other thing,’ she said suddenly, digging in her handbag. ‘I know you’re all capable and manly and everything, but seeing me flop is likely to freak you out, so,’ she was scribbling on a scrap of paper, ‘I want you to promise me something.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘No emergency services. No matter what you see, unless I am actually physically dying, no 999, no doctors, no hospitals.’ She held out the piece of paper but didn’t let him take it yet. ‘Got it?’

  ‘Do I get to know why?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I’ve seen enough hospitals to last me several lifetimes over. If you need to call anyone, call this, but only in an absolute emergency. He’ll be pissed if you phone because you’re feeling a bit wibbly, and this is someone that you really don’t want to piss off.’ She handed him the piece of paper; on it she’d written a mobile number and a single name: Ennias. ‘He’ll be pissed that I gave you his number anyway, but what the hell.’

  ‘Family doctor?’

  ‘Closer to just family. Sort of. Only in an emergency, remember?’

  ‘No problem.’ He pocketed the scrap.

  11:39

  Road-works began to pile up, part of the never-ending scheme to bypass traffic around where the traffic wanted to go. Cones funnelled two lanes into one, and they slowed to a crawl.

  11:42

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said.

  ‘You want to risk walking it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. It’s only a couple of streets from here.’ She looked at her watch and bit her lip, calculating. If she’d been on her own, then the answer would have been no, better to pass out in a taxi which could take her to hospital rather than on the streets where anything could happen. But Steve was with her, and she felt an unfamiliar fluttering sensation at the thought. Steve was by her side.

  Yes, but don’t you remember? whispered the Sophie-voice slyly. You wouldn’t even be in this mess if it weren’t for him.

  Decide. Now.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, threw a tenner at the driver and jumped out.

  2

  Steve was surprised by the ferocious pace which she set. He liked to think of himself as a tolerably fit man – he played a bit of pub football with the lads and went to tae-kwon-do class every week, and not just because it looked good on his CV – but rather than ‘escorting a young lady home’ he found himself hard-pressed to keep up. It didn’t allow much by way of conversation but then she was too preoccupied with the time anyway; checking her watch and then pressing on with greater urgency than before.

  She was renting a bed-sit as part of a terraced student house only a few streets away from the University, but with it being the Easter break, the other inhabitants were presumably at home for the holidays getting their laundry done, because when Steve and Vessa got there, it was locked and dark.

  He checked the time again. It was either dead on midnight or so close to it that he couldn’t tell the hands on his watch apart. Not bad going. She was fumbling for her keys.

  ‘I think that might be something of a world record,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘What do you say you and I enter the next…’

  ‘Goodnight Steve,’ she said rapidly, even as she was opening the front door. ‘And thanks. I’m a mad, ungrateful sod, I know, but I swear I’ll make this up to you.’

  She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and closed the door in his face. Through a panel of corrugated glass he saw a hall light come on and her wavering shape receding.

  For a moment he stood looking at the brass doorknocker.

  ‘Night then,’ he replied to it and turned to go. She Shall Be Called Mad as a Box of Frogs and Yet Strangely Attrac…

  There was a heavy thud from just inside the front door. The kind of thud which might be made by a human body falling to the floor.

  ‘Vessa?’ he called.

  Nothing.

  Worried, he cupped his hands around his face and pressed his nose up against the glass. He thought he could make out what could have been her, lying on the lower slope of a staircase.

  ‘Vanessa, can you hear me?’ Thoroughly alarmed now, he shoved at the door but wasn’t surprised when it didn’t move. Nor did her shape. If what she’d told him in the taxi had been true, she’d probably just passed out, but equally she could have bashed her head or broken something when she’d fallen. What if she were bleeding?

  ‘Vanessa!’ he yelled, banging on the door. This did no more good than before, nor did it awaken anybody else who might have been in the house. It crossed his mind to dial 999, never mind her barmy instructions to the contrary, but ultimately he wanted to be sure that he had absolutely no other choice before he did something which alienated her from him.

  Bracing himself, he booted at the door. He was expecting it to be a lot harder than it was on TV, and if Vessa had taken the time to bolt the door as she usually did, it would have been, but only the Yale latch held it and that burst free easily. The door slammed open and he fell into the hall.

  She lay at the foot of the stairs, unmoving. He quickly checked her over, discovering in a flood of relief that she was breathing easily, and her pulse was steady – steadier than his own, in fact. He told himself that you didn’t call an ambulance every time an epileptic had a seizure, as long as they were safe and unhurt, so he put her in the recovery position and then hovered indecisively. Her keys lay a few inches from her outstretched hand, but he found that he didn’t want to leave her for even the few minutes it would take to find out which of the upstairs rooms was hers. She seemed to be as comfortable as he could make her, but he had no guarantee that she wouldn’t stop breathing or have a seizure or something like that. He hesitated, weighing the probabilities.

  ‘I’ll be back as quickly as I can,’ he promised, grabbed the keys and ran upstairs. After a frantic bit of trial and error he found the right door and then returned to carry her as gently as he could up to her room. It was a narrow Victorian terraced house on three floors, and as Sod’s Law would have it, her room was on the topmost, overlooking the street.

  With Vessa deposited safely on her bed, he looked around for somewhere to sit. No way was he going to leave her unattended.

  There was just enough space for a bed, a dresser, a small armchair covered in glossy magazines, and a tiny sink-and-stove unit next to a fridge which made hotel minibars look generous. Under the window was a paper-strewn desk, along the back of which was stacked a row of textbooks. He expected to see that she was studying something pretty but useless like English or Art History, but found instead that they were quite random – they looked like the result of someone running blindfold through a second-hand bookshop with a butterfly net. There was a biog of George Fredrick Watts, of course, and a few books about art, but also lots of crystal-clutching silliness about chakras, dreams, demons and angels (Befriend Your Guardian Dolphin Spirit!), plus secondary school revision guides which were completely out of place next to some hardcore-looking textbooks about mental illness.

  He couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he was completely wrong about all of this, but she said she’d be awake at six, so he decided he’d watch over her until then, and if she didn’t he’d be straight on the phone to this Ennias person, whoever that was. He saw her eyeballs roving behind their lids as she slipped into REM sleep and started dreaming.
He’d have given anything to know what she was dreaming about. Just think of it as a kind of epilepsy, she’d said.

  Clearing the armchair of its magazines and settling himself into it as comfortably as he could, he set his phone alarm for a quarter to six and tried to catch a few hours’ sleep.

  3

  And in the dream-thronged darkness behind her eyelids, something battened on them, and grew strong.

  4

  He awoke to the smell of frying bacon and a savage cramp in the side of his neck. It was nearly seven.

  ‘Shit,’ he groaned and struggled up. His stomach grumbled in agreement.

  ‘And a good morning to you too,’ Vessa replied. She was standing at the tiny one-ring stove, pushing pieces of bacon around a frying pan which was approximately the same size as a table-tennis bat, with the window open on a clear spring dawn and the radio burbling. Her hair was damp, she was dressed in plain jeans and an ancient Rage Against the Machine t-shirt which read “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me”, and if anything she looked even more beautiful than last night.

  ‘My alarm was meant to go off.’

  ‘It did. It was going when I woke up. Very annoying sound. I turned it off – hope you don’t mind. You looked like you needed the sleep.’

  Steve hesitated, not quite sure whether he should mention the events of the previous evening. ‘Are you, you know, is everything?’

  ‘Me?’ she said in surprise and turned a radiant smile on him. It seemed impossible to square this picture with the anxious woman he’d found unconscious on her own stairs. ‘I’m absolutely fine! I said I would be. But you stayed anyway; that was very sweet of you. Would you like some breakfast?’

  Before he could reply, she tossed the spatula aside, snaked her arms over his shoulders and planted a deep kiss on his very surprised mouth. Her shampoo smelled of apples. ‘Or would you prefer something else?’ she murmured against his lips.

  By the time he arrived late to work, he was still starving but grinning from ear to ear.