by Chris Vick
‘But it is not safe. We see this.’
‘There’s food here.’
‘It is not enough. If one is ill?’
‘We’ll be okay. Who we gonna catch flu from?’
‘No. We must go home.’
She seemed so certain. No wonder she’s been quiet, I thought. She’s been thinking this through.
‘I want to go home. If we find people. Or if people find us. It is possible…’ She sighed, struggling to find the words. She took a deep breath. ‘I want to go home. With this money from jewels I will help my people. And perhaps, one day, it is possible we are together again. You and me.’
I didn’t know what she meant by ‘together’.
‘I don’t know what’s possible,’ I said. And I didn’t. ‘You and me, Aya, we’re together, here, now, in this world, with no borders, or countries, or rules. But back there? Well, whatever happens, I’ll stay with you.’
She shook her head and sighed again.
‘You cannot. A lost English boy? They will put you in the newspaper. I cannot be in this as I say.’ She said the words hard, with her hand open and palm up, rising and falling with every blunt word. ‘Even if we are together, first. Then? After? You will go to England. I will find my people. I will find my people. But I must be like a secret. The men, they know I have the jewels.’
‘And what will you do, Aya? How will you free your people?’
‘I will be like the warrior in the shadow.’
She was serious. She meant it.
And could I stay with her? No, she was right. I would go home. I saw it happening. And I hated it.
‘Well then, I’ll come back. When you know what’s happening. I’ll find you.’
Aya lowered her hands, and stared at the wall. That just made me angrier.
‘I will come back,’ I said. ‘I’ll do everything I can.’
‘What can you do?’ she said. ‘Now it is you, not me, that does not understand the world.’
I found the knife, to make the ruby blood promise. But Aya took the knife from me and put it on the ground.
‘You do not know what you mean. Do not swear, because it is maybe a promise you cannot keep.’
‘But I do mean it.’
We sat, listening to the crackling flames and the rustling wind.
‘What happen in your life?’ she said. ‘In England. If we go back?’
‘Next? Sixth form I guess.’
‘What is this?’
‘A kind of school. Then university. I want to be a scientist, a marine biologist.’ And it was only when I said that out loud that I knew it wasn’t true any more. That this, the boat and the island, had changed everything. And I didn’t know what I would or could do, or be, if we made it back.
‘And what will happen in your life?’ I said.
‘I do not know. But I know I must try to help my people. You, me, we have different journeys. But together we must leave. We must go.’ She pushed her food away.
‘It’s a stupid conversation, Aya. We’d never make it. We’re not going. We’ll wait to be rescued.’
‘All is possible, but you who are so good with this facts and logic, you know there is no boat. We must go home with our own strength, we must believe.’
‘Even if we did go, we’d have to wait weeks. Till we had salted fish, gull eggs, till we were strong enough and had a heap of supplies.’
‘We must leave now,’ she said.
‘Did you say now?’
Her eyes and voice were heavy with sadness. ‘Yes. Very soon.’
‘We’re in this together, Aya, but I’m not going to let you kill us.’
‘Please.’ In the firelight her eyes glistened with tears.
I wanted to get out then, to escape. I didn’t like seeing her like this. But… I leaned over the fire, tapping my head with my finger.
‘Aya, listen to me. There’s no logic in what you’re saying, no sense. Facts, Aya, that’s what matters. The truth. We would die.’
‘I say again. You know things of this logic,’ she said, her voice getting loud. ‘But you do not know all. You do not know if we can go and live. A long, good life. Here is possible we die.’
‘I know that. I do. I’ve thought about it. But out there it’s one big, fat unknown. I’m not leaving and definitely not now. You’ve said yourself. What if that was the first storm? What if it’s hurricane season or something?’
She folded her arms.
‘All life is a “big, fat unknown”. I will go myself.’
‘You’re not taking the boat! Even if we fixed it, it wouldn’t last more than a day or two. You’re not going alone. End of.’ I picked up the knife, stabbed a mussel and ate it.
Aya mimicked me: ‘Clang, clang with knife. Slurp, slurp with coconut. You eat like a goat!’ She stood and walked out.
We didn’t speak the following day. We avoided each other until evening. Then, the only exchange we had was short:
‘We must go,’ said Aya.
‘We’re not going, and you’re not going alone.’
‘We go. If not, I am go alone.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No!’
‘YES!’
I sighed, heavily.
‘Bill, I want to go home, I want to find Sakkina. Do you understand?’
I did understand. I wanted to go home, to see Mum and Dad. But I wasn’t going to get killed trying.
As was our way since the storm, we slept on opposite sides of the fire.
*
In the morning I took my notebook and sat at the edge of the spit. I thought about our options and all the things that could happen to us.
Aya was certain about going. I could stop her if I wanted to. I could keep a watch on her, and make sure she didn’t sneak off at dawn.
Would she do that? Would she really leave me here, alone?
I wrote down the possibilities:
1. We stay till we’re discovered. Or die.
2. We leave and make it back to the world.
3. We leave. And face sun demons and sea monsters and storms. And die.
I made a list.
Things I have done:
Killed a turtle
Survived a storm in a rowboat
Caught and eaten raw fish
Swam in pools of seawater
Been surrounded by whales
Listened to tales of kings and demons
Sat under a million stars
Tamed a wild bird
Rescued a girl
Been rescued by a girl
Seen a dead body
Seen a shark
And I thought how I hadn’t written about all those things in my notebook, but I promised myself that one day I would. Write them down, so the memories wouldn’t slip away, wouldn’t become not-real, the way the memories of my life before had become not-real.
And I thought about Stephan. How he had fought with Aya. And I felt awful, but told myself it had been a terrible accident.
Accident. Yes, that’s right. He had pushed her away, reached for the knife, then he fell.
Or had she pushed him away? Or both of them at the same time?
Truth was, I couldn’t remember for sure. It had happened so fast.
But it was an accident.
Then I wrote:
Things I might never do:
Go to uni
Get drunk
Marry
Have kids
Climb a mountain
Things I might never do again:
Eat pizza
Watch a film
Take Benji for a walk
See Mum and Dad
Have a bath
Play footy
I stopped then. Because the list would go on forever.
I looked at the three options I’d written down. They all began with ‘we’.
But there was another option.
I pictured it. Aya paddli
ng. The boat shrinking till it became a spot on the horizon, slowly vanishing.
Me eating by the fire. Waking. Alone.
I could stop her. I would stop her. But at the same time, I knew I didn’t have the right. And the truth was I didn’t need the boat for fishing.
That was a fact.
I thought of Stephan then. How he had been, when we arrived. I thought about what I might become, on the island, by myself.
As I was thinking I’d been twisting a bit of my t-shirt in my fingers. I looked at the cotton, how thin it was, at the fading ink of the duck cartoon on my chest. I looked at my chipped nails. And felt my hair, matted and thick.
I saw myself months from then, with longer, more matted hair and longer, broken nails. Clothes completely rotted away. Rambling to myself.
To Stephan’s ghost.
And I knew two things.
One. If Aya wanted to go, she would go. I’d stop her, once, twice, maybe a dozen times.
But eventually…
I read what I had written in the notebook what seemed like years before.
Even if they find two skeletons, not one. In this big nothing, that’s something.
And wrote:
And what about us, Aya? Even if we make it. What then?
What do you really think about all this, Aya? You and me, flung together by the storm. Easy to be here for each other. Okay. Not easy. We had no choice. But we are together.
What about when we’re rescued or find land?
Different journeys?
Not this one. This one we’ll travel together.
x
I found her sitting on the beach by a pile of grass and leaves. She was cutting them up with the knife and weaving them together.
‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘A hat?’
Aya shrugged.
I stood, watching a while. She carried on as if I wasn’t there.
‘You’re stubborn,’ I said. ‘You know that?’
Silence.
I picked up a pebble and chucked it so it landed in front of her. She ignored it.
‘You’d really go alone?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’
Silence.
‘I said okay!’
She looked up.
‘We’ll go. Both of us. We’ll use the tarpaulin to make a sail. There’s a steady wind been blowing for days now, from the west. We’ll make a mast with a branch from a fallen tree. We’ll glue the boat cracks together with tree sap. We’ll leave a sign saying we’ve been here, saying we’re sailing east. We’ve got coconuts and water. Give it a day so we can catch loads of fish, smoke them to take on the journey. Then, if the winds are still good, we’ll go.’
She stopped her work. ‘Swear.’
I took the knife off her, made a small nick on my thumb and pressed a dab of blood onto my chest. She got up and threw herself at me so hard I almost fell over.
*
We fished all day, and smoked the catch over the fire. Mussels and other shellfish too. We gathered coconuts. Aya finished weaving hats.
We made tiny holes in the tarpaulin and threaded vines and string made from coconut hair into them to use as ropes to control the angle of the tarp-sail.
We made a make-do rudder from a tree fallen in the storm. A mast too. I tied another branch across to hold the tarp-sail.
We took it out to test it.
We filled the hold with the tins we’d found and coconuts and smoked fish wrapped in leaves.
I took a branch and the knife and carved a figurehead with the face of a woman, which I stuck and tied to the prow with gum from a tree and the string made from coconut hairs.
Aya said we should give the boat a name. We called it Tanirt, which means angel.
‘Why angel?’ I said.
‘Because angels never die.’
Once, a few days before, a red ant had bitten me. I’d crushed it between my fingertips, which became stained. It had taken days to wash off. We made an inky paste of dead ants as their nest had been drowned in the storm. With a small stick Aya wrote Tanirt in Berber, with the crosses and circles and lines of her language, on the portside front of the boat, above the waterline. On the other side, I wrote Tanirt.
The sun was going down as we finished.
‘If tomorrow is good, we go,’ said Aya.
‘Yes.’
The days then had been breezy but not stormy. Sometimes there was more cloud or less wind, but generally since the storm it was a steady pattern of weather. I thought maybe the weeks of heat before the storms were a seasonal thing and maybe this would hold, while we sailed Tanirt all the way to Africa.
We poured coconut juice and fish blood on the prow of the boat. A kind of offering.
‘Keep us safe, Tanirt,’ we said, together. ‘Keep us safe.’
The Sea
i
We pushed the boat into the water and waded in till we were waist-deep. Aya climbed in first and held out her hand. I couldn’t take it. My feet were glued to the rock, to the island, to safety.
‘Come,’ said Aya. Her eyes were bright. I took her hand and climbed aboard.
We sat in the shallows, waiting for the morning breeze. All I had to say was: ‘Not today,’ or: ‘We don’t have enough fish,’ or just: ‘We can’t.’
But I didn’t say any of those things, and all Aya said was: ‘We are ready. Nous allons.’
Our world was packed into the boat: coconuts, dried seaweed, smoked fish wrapped in leaves, eggs, tins of food we’d found in the lighthouse, the knife, the fishing line, the turtle shell, the aman-maker and the half-barrel, full of water.
The sun chased the shadows away. The morning wind rippled the water and pushed at the boat, telling us it was time to go. All we had to do was lower the sail and let the breeze take us.
‘Now or never,’ I said.
‘It is now,’ said Aya. She knelt at the bow, gazing east. But her voice shook when she spoke and her hands were too tight on the gunnels.
I didn’t know much about sailing. But I knew the basics. Enough to know that once we set sail, it would be hard to turn back.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’
I stood and started untying the sail with hands that were heavy and numb.
Craaaawwk! Gull landed on the portside gunnel.
Yark, yark, yark. We going fishing?
‘I guess you ate it all already?’ I said. We’d said our goodbyes earlier and left Gull with a heap of guts and skins, to distract him. We didn’t want him with us. It wouldn’t be fair. We knew we had to travel east. We didn’t need him to help us find our path, we just had to keep going.
‘Gull, you will stay,’ said Aya.
‘Shoo.’ I waved at him. He flapped his wings, hopping from one leg to the other. I pushed him gently off the side with the oar. He pecked at it, flapped and flew away, then came back.
‘Go home!’ I shouted. ‘Go and fish and dive and argue with the other birds. Go and live your gull life, because if you come with us…’ I couldn’t say it. That we might die. I tried to be strong but it was hard, because I was telling him to go home. And the island had been our home too. And now we were leaving.
‘Shoo!’ I waved the oar at him. He dodged it, opening his beak wide and crawking. I swung the oar. It hit him. He flew away, came back.
I gritted my teeth and swung the oar at him again. I hated myself, but it was the only way to make him go.
‘Go!’ I shouted. He flew off. Before I was tempted to follow him I unfurled the sail.
The wind tugged at it, but it flapped, uselessly.
‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘We’re too heavy. We’re not going anywhere today, are we?’ But as if it was answering me, the wind puffed out the cheek of the sail and the boat juddered slowly through the water.
Aya paddled, to help us along while I steered with the rudder in one hand and the sail rope in the other. Then the sail filled tightly and we were off, cutting a V, leaving a wake in the
water.
There was no keel and only a make-do rudder and one sail. It was basic, we could only go where the wind wanted to take us. But it worked.
‘Sit on the aft,’ I told Aya. ‘Now starboard… now port.’ But she didn’t need telling. She jumped up or sat down when she needed to, held the gunnel, leaned off the boat so far it was dangerous, moving around as though it was some kind of dance. We were harnessing the wind’s power, me angling the sail with the homemade ropes so it would catch more to port or starboard as needed.
We were a few minutes offshore when the breeze and the angle of the rudder and the sail all fell into place. We cut forwards in a straight line, moving faster by the second.
‘We’ve done it!’ I cried. The island was already far away. There was no going back.
Aya didn’t look back at the island, not once.
We’d set the course and been sailing ten minutes or so when she looked up, shielding her eyes with her hand.
‘He is like a bad child,’ she said.
Gull swooped and landed on the prow, yarking angrily.
Where are we going?
‘Okay, Gull,’ I said. ‘You win. You’re coming too.’
ii
The first days were mostly good.
I made a promise to myself not to keep a tally. Not to count the days and the food. Not to calculate or plan. But to eat as much as we needed, to sail and no more. We just needed to keep going. We’d find land or die. And if we were going to die, I didn’t want a record of that. Not one Mum or Dad could ever read. I decided I wouldn’t write that letter. Because that would be surrendering to death.
And that wasn’t going to happen.
Sometimes it wasn’t windy enough so we rested or paddled. Other times the wind was too harsh. Force 3 to 5 at a guess. That would be great in a yacht, but it was too fierce for Tanirt. Then the prow pushed into the sea or we lost control, spinning hard and fast.
Sometimes the boat tipped so far over, the waterline and gunnel were centimetres apart. It was dangerous, but we couldn’t lose pace.
There was a lot of north in the wind and we sailed southeast, using the rudder to keep our direction true. Occasionally the wind was dead against us and we had to tack, starboard, port, starboard, port, unsure if we were even getting anywhere.
Twice we took in water and came close to capsizing. We had to bail hard.