Only the Ocean

by Natasha Carthew

  For Evelyn

  Books by Natasha Carthew

  Winter Damage

  The Light That Gets Lost

  Only the Ocean

  Poetry

  Standing Stone

  Flash Reckless

  Adult Fiction

  All Rivers Run Free

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The decision to run from the shack was the right one and the only one available to the girl and she took it without a second thought.

  She packed her bag and sheet-tied the baby to her back and she ran toward the gate, the gate that had been busted by looters and hung loose and merry in the wind.

  The baby cried out with the sudden smack of cold and the girl reached around to slap it shut the same way Dad and the others always did. Maybe the girl knew it was wrong someplace inside but she had yet to learn another way.

  She ran with her best-boots only-boots stabbing at the swamp-slop ground and lifted her legs high so as not to get pulled down into the muddy suck. If she could escape from the shack and the forest completely she would have a shot at the plan she had been working through.

  When she was clear of the home track that slit the woods clean in half the girl paused for breath and she told the baby whether it was listening or not that they were heading down to the river town, because that was where she was meant to meet the man that had set the plan in motion. The man that came to the shack occasionally to buy goods had set her a task.

  It was a plan that was meant for her and her alone; it had a name scribbled clean through it like a stick of rock and the name was Kel Crow and that was her name.

  Kel stood at the edge of the woods where the canopy sheltered them a little and she took her raincoat from the bag and hooked it over both their heads. She looked at the stream below her that used to be a lane and she walked the bank above and kicked a clod of wet earth into it and in the end she closed her eyes and jumped across the body of water.

  The other side of the stream used to be open farm land, or so they said. Kel could not remember a time before the floods and the constant rain that kept on coming whatever the time of year. These days the few crops still grown were planted in the disused gas drums that drifted above the ground. There was nothing left of the farm land but mud-sup plains; forever-fields of brown water, stagnant and still.

  Kel stood a moment on top of a once-was wall. Her eyes walked its thin winding line in the direction of the town. The early morning sky was much like every other: heavy heaving clouds circling and spitting gumball lead that caught on the wind and fired furious like bullets. Seaward to the west of the town she could see the towers, the barred communities where the grand folk lived; mini societies where the air was filtered and luminous lights splashed into their domed skies like newly formed planets. In the minds of the swamp inhabitants the towers were another world entirely. Neither side mixed. Neither saw how the other half lived. Some days Kel wondered about them, but most days she didn’t have the time, the energy. The towers were like mountains, distant.

  When the baby cried out she took one of the biscuits she had been hoarding and stuck it into its mouth, and when she thought she might cry too with the effort of exertion and escape combined she stuck a biscuit into her own mouth the same.

  If she could just get to town before anyone noticed she was gone, before Dad had time to realise the gate was still bust-broke and that the barbed wire had come down enough for the girl and the baby to get gone. If she could just walk the wall into town, keep her eyes away from the rising water and find the man who’d met her and liked her enough to hire her for the job.

  Kel Crow was on her way and she felt like shouting out loud for all the hot-head scheming that was seared through it and so she picked up her feet, set a course along the rutted wall and started to run.

  Kel entered the town as the boy who rang the bell for tips hung from his window to chime out twelve o’clock. She had been walking for three hours, if it wasn’t for the risk of rot getting to her feet she could have gone on as far as forever. She untied the baby and put it to the ground in order to return life to her back and she stretched all ways to loosen the knots and bent to pick up the kid and she carried it in her arms through the plank-board streets whilst she observed her surroundings. The rivers and the streams and the memory of fields that once worked for something backalong were now linked one way or other with walkways and reclaimed pallets and planks and boats meant for stopping and idling: stepping stones precariously placed to make something of a community, no matter how unhinged.

  To Kel community meant nothing more than disease and feuding and thieving and fearing just about. When people saw her they looked away because most knew Kel and her family. The Crows were drug-runners, pushers, the worst kind of swamper. Most had heard of the Crow girl with the wild streak running, she had danger in her eyes, same as her dad, and it was those eyes Kel fixed on the river bar, the one place on that sprawl of water-borne pontoons that passed for town where she knew the man was waiting for her.

  Kel stood a minute outside the drifting, bumping clapperboard hut and she lit herself a cigarette to steady her nerves right for talking and when the baby griped at the smoke she blew more until its eyes closed tight.

  The bar was a place of open any-old trade. People sat intent and pressed into each corner of the small stuffy room, men and women and youths like Kel who had grown wise with the work of a wretched life. Kel thinned her eyes to adjust to the smoky, candle-lit haze and she stood at the bar and asked to see the owner and said that he would be expecting her.

  ‘One of em Crow kids, int you?’ said the woman.

  Kel shrugged the usual ‘so what’.

  ‘The girl, only Crow girl I heard of.’ She looked at the baby. ‘See you bin busy. I got some goods from you backalong for me old mother before she passed, came highly recommended.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  The woman told Kel to help herself to a beer whilst she went out back and Kel sat the baby in one of the half-barrel chairs and went behind the bar, poured herself a drink and then she waited.

  She had waited her whole life for an opportunity such as this one. Fifteen years longing to escape. She wished it had come earlier, two years earlier, two years before the stupid me-me-me baby that never gave up on the whining and the crying out. She looked down at it and sighed and wondered why she had bothered to lug the thing along with her.

  It bothered Kel that she might have weakness cracking within, but if she hadn’t taken the baby its life would have become her life, lived all over again. Even a stupid baby didn’t deserve that.

  ‘You dodged a bullet,’ she told it. ‘I might not like you and you sure don’t like me but I’m tellin you this is better un that cus that int no fun.’

  ‘What int?’ asked the man.

  ‘Life,’ said Kel, and she swung around on the stool to face the man standing behind the bar.

  ‘You’re right there.’ He nodded and poured himself a beer and stretched close. ‘So, you ready?’

  ‘Born for it.’ Kel stood tall. It was her way of showing how prepared she really was.

  The man took a gulp of his pint, his eyes on Kel. She kept her eyes on him.

  ‘So –’ he set the glas
s down on to the bar – ‘first things first, you remember the name of the ship you’re meant for?’

  Kel nodded. ‘Kevothek.’

  ‘Remember what it means?’

  ‘Cornish for “powerful”.’ She kicked at the sawdust on the floor and wondered if the man thought her stupid cus she wasn’t.

  ‘And the girl’s name?’

  ‘Rose. I also know to find her in the captain’s quarters cus the captain sleeps in his office and she’s his daughter.’

  ‘And where’s his office?’

  ‘Bow room.’

  The man smiled. ‘That’s it, he eats sleeps shits counts his money in there accordin to my source, calls himself a captain but em tower folk don’t know nothin bout hard graft.’

  Kel took a gulp of her beer and when she saw the baby looking she gave it a little on the tip of her thumb.

  ‘And I told you it’s a cargo ship?’

  ‘Course.’

  The man set down his beer and came around the bar. ‘There’s no room for error here, you know that, don’t you? We all got somethin ridin on this.’

  Kel nodded. If he only knew how much she had riding; it was the difference between life and death. ‘I’ll see you in three days at the docks, midnight, and you don’t have to worry. I’ll have the girl in tow.’

  ‘And don’t rough her up, I know what you Crows are like. Roughin up int part of the deal.’

  ‘I int no animal,’ said Kel and when the baby squealed she looked away. ‘I bin over this a hundred times, I won’t be seen, won’t smack the girl, not even a hair. Three days and we’ll be waitin for you at the gates, Falmouth docks.’

  ‘And you sure you got a boat to get yourself down there?’

  Kel nodded. That was the easy part.

  The man smiled. ‘OK then, Kel Crow gets a good job done, int that right?’

  Kel shrugged a maybe but it was true. Nothing was too much for a girl with nothing to lose. Everything about the plan had brilliance carved into it and like a fairytale promise it was about to come true.

  ‘I knew you were the one for the job.’ He bent to pour them a whisky each; in the swamps a shot was as good as a promise and a handshake combined. ‘Good for the job cus you’re as strong as any lad I know but you got the cunnin of a girl, int I right?’

  Kel nodded and she tried to agree but the whisky had its daggers in her throat.

  ‘Strong as a boy and cunnin as a girl and twice over bein you’re a Crow and all.’

  Kel said yes and in her mind she knew she was good for the job on both accounts, but she had more driving force propelling her than that. The plan would lead to goods for keeping to herself, keeping and doing and selling as she pleased, and she put her hand to her heart to feel it beat out the irregular rhythm as always. She had always thought her heart would be the death of her, but now it was her life.

  ‘You all right?’ asked the man.

  ‘More un.’ She downed the whisky and the last of her beer and she told him she would never be anything other than all right again.

  ‘Perfect,’ he smiled. ‘Perfect cus the Kethovek’s come in and it’s about to back-turn.’

  Kel nodded and she fingered the last tip of jar whisky and rubbed it on the baby’s gums and then she tried her hand at smiling and said goodbye.

  In three days Kel would have the first part of her plan completed. It seemed like forever had been planned and in a way it had, and she told the baby as they went to sit at the river edge that it had to be on its best behaviour, because this was it, this was the plan that would change their lives. If not, her heart was due to bust and break soon as, and if it did the baby would be good as dead the same.

  Kel asked every bit-bob boat that came close enough for shouting to if they might be heading toward Falmouth Bay, but she knew she looked like trouble and that was fair enough because she just about was. She would have to go at things another way.

  She sat back on the pontoon that was like every pontoon floating and settling beside the rivers in that part of Cornwall, and she watched the water run wild and rapid toward the sea beneath her swinging boots. No matter how much water fell from the leaden slate-pit sky it seemed there was always room for more in the dirt-crack fissures of the earth.

  She wondered if there were other parts of the world worse than this sucking circle of landslides and rising tides and forever floods, and whether she might see some of that other world and not just dream about it. The floods were the worst; they washed and rubbed everything russet red with mud. They had split what they called civilisation in two. A fissure that had the swamp people grapple with the wash-away water whilst the rich slept high and happy in the clouds; clouds that circled the towers and surrounded them with trenches and walls the height of forever. Now Kel was that bit closer she could clearly see their beauty, the trees that circled the perimeters, the ivy that draped from the walls like curtains. She wondered what secrets they held.

  She sighed and when the wind picked up and made waves in the river she unstuck the baby from off the tread-boards and stood to keep the wet from catching in her boots. She waited outside the bar and retied the baby. Then she climbed the ladder that clung for all its life was worth to the side of the river bed.

  She spotted a speedboat that some fool had left ticking with the key still dangling and decided to steal it, even though she could see from its livery that the speedboat was also a law boat. If she could defeat the swamps and their death-rot squalor she could get to the coastline quickly and to the ocean that would lead to better things. She climbed aboard and strapped the baby in next to her best she could and she sat back against the hessian spring chair that had been skinned of its leather and with both hands tight to the steering wheel and her foot jammed to the floor she ran herself headlong speeding toward the south coast.

  She gripped the wheel of the stolen boat with the whites of her knuckles flashing occasional red and she thought about her plan. She ran the details back and forward until it was set down clear as day. It was a good plan and more than that it was a doable plan; it had to be, because if it did not work she knew she would die.

  Death in mind, this was how she negotiated the river; whooping and calling out to whoever-whatever that she was ocean bound and when the baby cried she whooped all the more to put happy into its ears. When at last the boat collided with the harbour wall of the docks she counted out her breathing, told her heart to quit with the run around, that it was made for action. Kel Crow, fierce on the outside when inside she was breaking bit by bit.

  She put her hand to her chest and tallied back from ten. The heart was the start of it; born with a defect that made her fear for her life each day and then when the baby was born everyone said it was a done deal, game over. It was then that she first thought of escape, a last-ditch attempt at saving herself, all because of the stupid baby and her stupid heart that beat wrong and was shaped wrong and had wrongness stretched clean through it.

  Kel grabbed her saddle bag, swaddled the baby and jumped from the boat. The solid ground felt good beneath her feet and she took a moment to glance at her surroundings. Evening light fanned dust shadows across the wet alleyways, and smoke from the boat’s engine crept up the sides of buildings and caught beneath the gutters. Everything in slow motion, when all Kel could think of was speed.

  She told herself to take a minute, stay hidden in the shadows and wait to see if anyone had noticed her or the police boat that was still smoking out on the water.

  ‘OK,’ she said to the baby, ‘let’s go,’ and she tied it to her back and coiled her saddle bag around her neck.

  Slowly she made her way toward the centre of the docks, the row of cargo ships jostling for space, their rigs and cranes so closely packed Kel couldn’t see where one ended and the next began.

  And all the while the sound of sirens getting nearer. They sounded like screams; it made her shudder, she’d never heard so many or so close, they rarely strayed far from the tower perimeters. Something was happening
up ahead and instinct was to turn around, but Kel had come too far.

  She was no longer alone, people stepped from the shadows and as they pushed past running in her direction she went with them. For these swamp people, to reach the ocean was to get to a boat and have half a chance of escaping from whatever this was. Perhaps it was a crime they had or hadn’t committed, perhaps it was more than that.

  Either way, Kel had never seen such mayhem. Something must’ve happened in the swamps. Kel had been so focused on her escape she hadn’t given it heed, but now thinking back to town, the way folk looked at her and the way they looked at each other, there’d been something boiling beneath the surface, heat unnoticed.

  There was always some kind of trouble brewing between the two sides, but this seemed different, worse, and whatever it was had the police armed and ready on the docks and the masses fearing and running for their lives. She wondered if the rich had prepared for this latest uprising, or if they even knew it was happening right beneath their feet. She doubted it.

  Kel told the baby not to believe that there was no way out. That though they existed at the root of the rot and sat in the muck and the stench of the thing, still life went on, there were ways to make life go on. Kel didn’t want what the tower people had; she wanted only two things, a heart she could rely on and freedom from kin.

  As it was, the harbour and the docks in general had nothing to offer the screaming masses except the usual rough-neck looting trawlers and the cargo ships that ran guns and stolen goods back and forth across the Atlantic. Kel knew about the ships because she’d been thinking about them long before tonight. She reached into her boot and pulled out her notebook. The plan was set and firm, and she told the baby what it was she was meant to do in order to hear the plan out loud.

  ‘Board the ship,’ she whispered. ‘Board the ship that’s meant, then when out sailin merry in the ocean proper steal a dinghy and kidnap the girl.’ She tilted her head to see if the baby was listening and it was. ‘Now this is the best bit, swap the girl for the bag of goods and head out to Bottom America, then sell the drugs for the money that’s gonna pay for the operation.’