The swaying and thudding’s been less violent for the last little while. Rory uncurls himself from the seat where he’s been lying praying for the voyage to be over and heads back to the ladder. This time he hardly has to hold on at all.
The sun’s gone a long way west. It’s right behind them. It’s striking the Mainland cliffs full in the face, turning them the deep and glowing color of rust. They’re so huge they look like they’re about to topple over. The waves battering their base are hardly more than a white pencil line rubbing itself out and redrawing itself. They could swallow the islands where he lives like a whale.
(Lived.)
The boat’s passing a cluster of offshore rocks, like the western rocks beyond Briar except on the same scale as the cliffs: even the smallest one’s twice the height of their mast. One of them’s topped by a lighthouse, a looming pillar of deserted stone. Beyond the lighthouse is an even more enormous dead thing, a massive tanker impaled on a claw of rock. The wind and waves have pinned it there, as if to mock the failed light.
None of that’s what Lino and Silvia are staring at, though. She comes behind him and steers his shoulders to look the right way. “On the top,” she says. “See them?”
The clifftops are a stark horizon, rust below, clear blue sky above. Something moves along that line.
“Three,” Per says. “Watching us.”
As he says it, Rory sees them properly. The silhouettes turn the right way and they’re lined up one behind the other. They’re horses and their riders picking their way along the flat land above the cliffs, tracking the route of the boat.
A glimmer in the air makes him blink. The ghostly fire’s still circling the boat. Per’s still holding his staff up with his free hand. His arm must be getting tired. He looks drawn and tense.
Lino bounces on his toes and waves vigorously towards the horses, provoking a burst of cross Italian from Silvia.
“Have to land,” Per says. “No choice. Time going out.”
“Where?” Silvia says, and Rory sees what she means. The coast is steep brute rock as far as the eye can see.
Per grunts a shruggy kind of grunt. “Lino’s looking.” He eases the bow northward to run parallel with the line of the coast, away from the rocks.
“What’s wrong?” Rory asks Silvia.
“We need a place to come to land.”
“What if there isn’t anywhere?”
“Then,” Per says, with heavy satisfaction, “all dead.”
“Ignore him,” Silvia says, settling close to Rory. “You know the problem with Per? He’s from . . . Danmark?”
“Denmark?” Where Rory remembers this from he has no idea.
“Yes. Northern. Cold and dark all winter. These north people, the cold gets in their blood, I think.”
“Donne,” Lino shouts over his shoulder, from the bows.
Silvia translates: “Women.”
Rory peers at the high silhouettes. Other people. The Mainland must be full of other people, like the islands used to be. “How can he tell?”
“Lino has very good eyes.”
“Women,” Per says, lingering over the word. Vimm-en.
“The men would stay away from the sea,” Silvia says, nodding to herself. “Let’s hope.” Seeing Rory’s look, she explains. “Women are safer. Even more safe if there’s only three.”
“Are they enemies?”
“Everyone you don’t know is an enemy first,” Silvia says. “You walk as far as me and Lino, you learn this.”
He’s remembering horses. There were two, on Home. They lived in a field between the Abbey road and the Pond. Fields were flat then, and green, just grass: you could see all the way across, walk all the way across even. The horses had coats to wear, and their own shed. He can picture himself and Scarlet climbing over a gate and walking across that flat green grass, each with an apple cut into quarters. The huge beasts came over, frightening him, but Scarlet stood there with her palm out flat and let them snaffle the apples with their funny furry lips. How could they have given food to animals? But he remembers: there was so much food in The Old Days. You took a boat across to Tesco on Maries and came home with bags and bags of it. He can’t stop remembering. It’s as if the islands were a prison, and while he was jailed there he couldn’t think about anything beyond its walls. How could he ever have made himself believe that those specks on a map were the whole world, and those coughing wheezing women all the people in it? The Mainland’s vast and seems to go on forever, sweep after sweep of cliff marching off into the hazy distance. With it comes a whole universe of things he can suddenly think about again, chocolate and TV and computer games, and people most of all, so many people you didn’t even know everyone’s name. Scarlet loved horses. (His father called it a phase. It’ll be boys next, he said, winking.) Maybe that’s her, up there, right now, watching him arrive. Maybe she and Jake and his father didn’t just sail off the edge of the world into oblivion. Of course they didn’t. They’d have sailed to this enormous solid shore same as he’s just done, and found horses and who knows what else, bags of food. Cars. Shopping. Chips. No wonder they never bothered to come back.
Per leans across the cockpit and yanks a line. The boom strains tighter and the boat heels alarmingly, furrowing deeper into the surf.
“No time,” he says.
He sounds strained. Rory turns in alarm and sees that he’s lowered the staff at last. His arm’s shaking beside him. The fire in the air seems fainter. Silvia grips the rail, looking alarmed. She’s about to say something when Lino shouts.
“Ecco!” He leans over the bow, pointing.
The coast is headlands and promontories, shouldering into the sea one after another. They’ve sailed far enough towards one to see into the bay between it and the next, the hollow between the shoulders. A strip of sand is showing itself below the cliffs.
Per growls something incomprehensibly guttural, though just by the tone of it you can tell it’s swearing, and bears away from the wind at once, setting course for that fragment of beach. “Watch for rocks,” he shouts. (Votch’fer Ox: English words sort of hop up and down when he says them, like they’re in an ocean swell too.) Silvia hauls herself uneasily along the rails to the bow. Suddenly there’s a lot of busy shouting and pointing and tightening and winding. Rory knows at once he’s in the way. He retreats hurriedly to the cabin and sits there alone, listening to the noises overhead.
He shouldn’t be here. It’s evening; he should be finishing off his jobs, then going to the Abbey for supper. He’s small and far from Home, on a quest he doesn’t understand. When he pretended he understood it they just laughed at him.
He goes to the tiny forward cabin where his mother locked him in. The comics have scattered all over the place. Kneeling awkwardly as the boat rolls under him, he starts gathering them up, packing them away in their bag, getting ready, though he has no idea at all what he’s getting ready for.
14
Calm.
After so long lurching around in the swell the stillness makes him dizzy. Things bump against the hull, to remind him that he’s still afloat. He’s never felt so relieved just to be alive.
Per’s steered them into a sort of harbor. Really it’s just one end of a long flotsam beach, with a stone quay hooking out from the rocks to make a pocket of shelter. They’ve come to rest in that haven along with lots of other lost floating things. The sea’s completely still here, and completely invisible, carpeted in a scum of kelp and algae and shapeless plastic lumps bulging like weird fungi. A few identifiable objects poke out of it, sad islands: oil drums, tires, a red lifejacket, the upturned hull of a dinghy, a lobster trap enmeshed in the corner of a net. A slipway runs out from the shore into the carpet of rubbish, or used to: sections of it have collapsed. At its top there’s about half of a tumbledown brick shed, roofless and charred. Behind that, on the shore, rising out of a swamp of ground-hugging weeds and rusting cars, there are other ruined buildings, houses, caked in moss and crawling with ivy, what’s left of t
heir roofs splattered with bird poo. At the tideline a froth of congealed scum stretches all the way around the crescent beach, backed against a bulwark of driftwood and plastic junk, buoys, shopping bags, nameless chunks of faded something-or-other. There are three boats lying on their sides along the beach, two fishing boats and a yacht with a broken mast, each of them skirted with a puddle of livid weed. Everything, absolutely everything Rory can see, looks as if it’s just been dropped or thrown away. The land rises up behind the beach, covered in the bitter green of unchecked summer growth, and goes on rising, and rising. There’s so much of it. On the islands the hilltops and heaths are scoured by wind and the sea’s always over the next crest no matter where you are. Here the land is massive and solid and looks like it goes on forever. It’s incredibly silent. It has no interest in the water. It’s like a monstrous back turned to the sea, ignoring it. It’s not in motion. It’s windless, heavy. Dead.
There’s a dead man too.
It takes Rory a while to spot him among all the other rubbish on the beach. It’s only because the rest of the gang have gone quiet and are all facing the same way, looking at something, that Rory sees him at all; and then it’s another while before the upright length of wood and the flabby blotchy thing stuck to its seaward side arrange themselves into identifiable things: a limp bloodless man tied to a post. At first it looks like he’s been decapitated, but that’s just because the sagging blob at the top is only barely recognizable as a head.
“Welcome to England,” Silvia says, breaking the silence.
“I go look.” The boat’s drifting near the quay, bumping its way through bobbing filth. Lino hops onto the starboard rail like a squirrel, steadies himself, and then springs across the gap as though he doesn’t weigh anything at all. He lands on his feet, grinning.
“First!” he says. “Like Cristofero Colon.” He mimes planting a flag.
“Hey, Columbus. Take this.” Per tosses him a length of rope.
“Si, capitano.” Lino makes the end fast to a ring of rusty iron.
“We don’t fly,” Per says, and Lino chuckles.
The two of them don’t even seem to have noticed the corpse, the dead land, the disgusting ruin spread around them. On the contrary, Per’s almost cheerful, by his standards. Rory looks back along the beach. A crow’s perched itself on the dead man’s shoulders and started to peck.
He loses his balance and drops to his knees, about to be sick. Per snorts.
“Better send this boy home,” he says.
Silvia’s pushing a duffel bag up from the cabin. “Rory comes with us,” she says. “I told you.”
Per shakes his head, but doesn’t argue. “New boyfriend,” he mutters under his breath, but only after Silvia’s gone back below to fetch another bag.
* * *
The three of them—Lino’s gone off somewhere—are ferrying their small pile of belongings from the quay to a patch of weed-split concrete farther up in the wreckage of the town when Per stops and looks up at the headland above, shading his eyes against the descending sun. He points with his staff. He hasn’t let go of it for a second, no matter how full everyone else’s hands are.
“Look,” he says.
On the brow of the headland, overlooking the town and its crescent bay, two mounted people are silhouetted against the late-afternoon sky. Rory can see the horses whickering and fidgeting.
“Only two now,” Silvia says.
“One went for more,” Per says.
“Maybe.”
Per foots his staff on the ground and leans on it with a satisfied grunt. “Women,” he says. “Let them come.”
Silvia’s frowning as she stares up. The two riders are facing down towards the town, unmoving. “They’re not afraid of us,” she says. “They just watch.”
Per laughs, just a shake of his shoulders. “Teach them fear,” he says. His fingers flex around the staff. Silvia glances at him as if surprised.
“We won’t make any trouble,” she says. “OK?”
“Coming now,” Per says, nodding up at the riders. He’s right, they’re moving off, turning the horses unhurriedly. The silhouettes are hardly more than hand-sized up on the ridge but Rory thinks he sees a long ponytail bouncing as one of them forces her mount into a trot.
“I don’t think so,” Silvia says. “They see the boat long ago. If they want to stop us they can come to the shore before we arrive. I think they wait for more of them.”
Per straightens his back. “Be ready, then.”
“What are we going to do?” Rory says.
It’s the first thing he’s said since he stepped ashore. He feels like just another piece of luggage.
“Where are we going to sleep?” he says. “What’ve we got to eat?”
Silvia looks at him as though noticing for the first time that he’s tired and frightened and small. He’d be hungry too if his stomach wasn’t still so upset by the crossing that the thought of eating makes him want to be sick.
Per sighs, picks up his staff and a bulky sack, and walks away.
Silvia puts her hands on her hips. “Come,” she says. “Let’s find a place to stay.”
He stands where he is. He’s looking at his toes because he’s afraid he’s going to tear up like a baby. He doesn’t want it to be like this. The Mainland’s nothing like what he remembered. It’s like the worst bits of Home, the ruined side, where everything’s smashed up and lying around overgrown, but there’s so much more of it. And the superheroes in the comics don’t grunt and squabble and haul bags around.
Silvia sits down by his feet. “Now you miss where you come from, yes?”
He doesn’t want to say anything to her.
She rolls her neck, unstiffening. “You know something, Rory? I look at you and I see myself.”
By now he ought to be used to her never saying what you think she’s going to say, but it startles him yet again.
“I was nine years old,” she says. “I think. Maybe ten. The same as you. One morning I wake up and I’m all on my own. I remember it like yesterday, how it feels. Who will look after me? What can I do? You can’t imagine the next day. You think it’s impossible, you’re not going to live. I’m not talking about when they took me away from the orphanage. That time they put me with people at least. I’m talking about another part of my story, one I don’t tell you yet. When I’m far from where I came from, in a strange country, no friend, no family, no one. I lost that morning the only person I loved, like mother and father and sister and brother all in one person. I was a small girl completely alone in the world. You don’t believe me? It’s true.” She taps his legs, almost in irritation. “And for me there was no Silvia Ghinda talking to me, telling me, I know what it’s like for you. No one at all. Only one person I met that day who spoke to me.”
This is such an odd thing for her to finish with that he looks around after a while to see whether something’s interrupted her. He finds her staring at him, the late sun making her face glow rust-colored like the cliffs.
“But you don’t know about him,” she says, “do you.”
“Me,” he says, “No, why would I?”
She sighs. “Anyway. And after all that, here I am. Twenty years later and many hundred kilometers away. Still living, you see. You too. You will go on. Some days you feel you’ve come to the end of the road, you can’t go anymore, but the next day it’s different. OK?”
“OK,” he says. It’s very hard not to say what she wants you to say when she’s staring at you.
“Me and Lino, we travel a long way together, I told you. Many many months. Many places much worse than this. At the end of every day it’s the same: find a safe place, find food. Sleep safe, be ready for the next day.” She stands up: Per’s coming back. “We know how to do it. At the beginning we make mistakes. Now, never. Tonight we’ll be OK. Tomorrow we’ll be OK. We go on. You’re like Roma now, hmm? Traveling people.”
He has a terrible vision of the rest of his life being like today, queasy, terr
ifying, trudging bewildered through wastelands carrying sacks for Silvia and Per and Lino.
She ducks close and whispers in his ear, “But we’re close to the end now,” she says, to him only. “Very, very close.”
A sharp whistle comes from somewhere above. “Ah, Lino!” Silvia says, and just like that she’s up and away, as if that’s it, she’s bored of trying to make him feel better. Per mutters something to her and the two of them head away among the buildings, stamping down nettles and sickly grass. No one gives him a second look. It’s hard to be miserable when no one notices you doing it. He doesn’t like being the last one left in sight of the tied-up dead man on the beach, so after a moment he decides he’d better follow them. A familiar smell stops him as he picks up one of the sacks. He pokes inside the top of it and finds a loaf of Libby’s spelt bread.
* * *
After a lot of trudging around between abandoned cars and mounds of bramble the gang settle on a forlorn bungalow at the very edge of the village, the last house before it surrenders to the tangle of plant matter tumbling down the hill like a fetid green glacier. Inside it’s thick with rat droppings and dust and pollen and leaves. There’s a room with the remains of two chairs and a sofa. They look as if a goat’s tried to eat them. A grey-white kitchen machine’s lying on its side with cords trailing out of it like tails.
It’s not even the ruin of a house. It bears the same relationship to a house as the crow-mangled flappy puff of flesh on top of the dead men on the beach bears to a human head. The back half of it has collapsed in a heap of brick and chunks of plaster. This is a good thing, apparently, because it means they can light a fire on the floor and let the smoke straight out. Rory can’t believe they’re really going to eat and sleep here but no one cares what he believes. They gather leaves and dry sticks and handfuls of flammable rubbish and collect their belongings and open bags and arrange themselves around the floor as if this is what they do every evening. Which, he supposes, it probably is.
In the comics the superheroes have secret lairs full of solemn machinery and grand lonely corners. In the comics they also don’t smell. Rory didn’t notice it on the boat but now they’re crammed in together he can’t miss it. Despite all their comings and goings none of the three of them has bothered to fetch a bucket of water, which even he knows is about the first thing you do in the evening, so it’s not as if any of them is going to wash either. Though—this thought comes to him slowly, as if there must be something wrong with it—he doesn’t actually know where you’d get water here, and, presumably, neither do they.
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