by Chris Vick
His grin drops like a stone. His burning fierceness falls into shadow. For a second I see… Is it confusion, or fear?
I feel the t-shirt ripped from my body. The sun burning my chest.
Aya’s whisper: ‘Tanirt has secrets. In the hold—’
Night.
Nowhere
i
Out of darkness come shouts. Shrieks of joy.
‘He’s moving. Thank God!’
‘Calm, darling. He has to come round in his own time.’
‘Daaaad?’ I slur.
‘Yes, son. We’re here.’
‘Bill.’ A woman’s voice. ‘I’m Dr Jones. You’re in hospital, in London. You’re safe. How are you feeling, Bill?’
I’m drifting. It takes a while to realise I’m floating on a soft bed, a sea of nothing. I open my eyes but see only shapes and blurs.
‘Aya! Where’s Aya?’
‘What’s Aya?’ Mum says.
‘Where am I?’
The doctor explains again, slowly. ‘Hospital. London.’
‘Where is she? Aya!’ I’ve called her name before I think not to, before I remember my promise.
‘There’s no one but you, Bill,’ says Dr Jones. ‘You were found alone.’
I’m alive. I’m in London. Mum and Dad are here. But no Aya.
‘Mum.’
‘We’re here, Bill.’ Mum takes my hand and squeezes.
‘Yes, we’re here, son.’ Dad holds the other hand. There are hugs and tears. Plenty.
I try to speak. We all do. But it’s hard to find the words. And it’s enough to hold their hands and to know they are here. Whatever happens now, they are here.
I cry. Not just because I’m back with Mum and Dad. It’s not even to do with Aya. It’s because I’m alive. Only…
‘I can’t see.’ I’m alert now. The blurred vision isn’t just me coming round, it’s half-blindness.
‘Can you see anything, Bill?’ says Dr Jones.
I blink and try to focus.
‘A yellow blur. You’re shadows behind it. I see bits in the corners…’
‘The sun has damaged your eyes. We’ll run tests. Your sight should return fully. But it will be days, maybe weeks.’
Then. Another realisation.
‘My foot.’ I can feel part of it – no – the absence of part of it. I try to wriggle toes that aren’t there.
‘You’ll have to be brave, son,’ Dad says, ‘I’m afraid you’ve…’ His voice breaks. ‘There was nothing they could do. You’ve lost some of your right foot. Some toes. But they can do things with prosthetics. And… you’re lucky to be alive. It’s a miracle. We always believed there was a chance. Something else you should know. The boys on Pandora, they’re all alive and well.’
‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘Were there… other boats, in the storm?’
‘Yes, there was another boat. They were all rescued too, apart from one girl. She went missing, presumed drowned. But yes, the crew of Pandora are all alive and well.’
I picture Wilko and the others. And I think about the people on Aya’s boat. I can’t feel elated. I try, but I can’t. Where is she?
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Four weeks, in an induced coma.’
‘Coma!’
‘Yes, but at least you get your own room,’ Dad says.
I laugh at that.
‘It’s been months all told,’ Mum says. ‘You’re sixteen now. We’ll celebrate your birthday, as soon as we get home.’
Dr Jones says I have to rest. She shoos Mum and Dad out.
Thoughts tumble. I’m told by Dr Jones that I was found near the shore, in the boat. Alone. Was Aya rescued? Did she swim to shore? How did she get off the boat before I was found? Did someone take her against her will?
There are no answers. No story I can think of that makes any sense.
ii
Dr Jones asks a lot of questions. Her voice is posh, but warm.
Now I’m awake I’ve been moved onto a ward. To give me some privacy, Dr Jones pulls curtains around the bed.
‘The day they brought you here, well, I’ve never seen anything like it. You were starved and dehydrated. Your leg was swollen, your foot was black. You’ve had blood poisoning, severe dehydration and skin burn. They had to hold you for five days in Morocco just to stabilise you before putting you on a plane. It’s a miracle. How did you live, all those weeks?’
‘I did what I had to. To survive.’ I think about eating a turtle. The island. Stephan. Killing the shark. Aya.
‘You were very brave,’ Dr Jones says.
‘Anyone will do what they have to do to live. It’s not being brave, you don’t have a choice.’
‘You should tell us what happened. Everything,’ Dr Jones says. ‘It’ll help us get you better.’
I wonder if she’s thinking of my body or my mind when she says ‘better’. I want to talk, but I don’t want to lie.
‘I had tins of food. I made an aman-maker—’
‘What?’
‘Water. I made a water-maker.’ I change the subject. ‘Who found me?’
‘A fisherman.’
I wait, but Dr Jones doesn’t say more.
‘How? Where?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know exactly. When you were waking you said: “Where is she?” You said: “Aya.” Who is Aya?’ Dr Jones is curious.
‘Where is the fisherman?’
‘A long way to the south of Morocco. The edge of a desert. Another country. A war zone.’
‘Can I get hold of him?’
‘Why?’
‘I… I want to know how he found me.’
I feel Dr Jones’s fingers on my arm, just below where a drip is sticking into me.
‘You know you can talk to me, we have to trust each other,’ she says.
I don’t say more. Can’t say more. She rubs my skin, pats my arm.
‘It’s okay, Bill. We have time.’
The bed is a cocoon of comfort. But it feels wrong. Soft and alien. The atmosphere is lukewarm and air-conditioned. That feels wrong too.
I remember the sea, rocking the hard bed of the boat as I drifted to sleep. I remember the cold nights and burning days. Outside I hear voices, cars, birds singing, music.
It’s like that park in Italy. Civilised, but not-real.
Later there’s hot soup and bread, tea, a bottle of Coke.
It all tastes new.
*
It will take a long time: to be well, to see, to walk, to feel normal. Or maybe there never will be ‘normal’. The world of the boat and the world of after-the-boat aren’t part of the same universe.
*
Dr Jones wants to know about my ‘diet’, and the weeks of sun, and survival; all the grim details of how I stayed alive, or more accurately, how I nearly died. I tell her bits, careful not to say ‘we’; careful not to give too much away.
My sight comes back, more each day. Not fully. I see colours and blurred shapes. My vision is filled with the burn. Sometimes it’s orange, sometimes brown. Spots of nothing swim in front of me like fish.
One thing Dr Jones doesn’t ask about for a long time is my foot. Eventually we do talk about it, because I want to walk. I’m sick of using a bedpan and the bed is becoming a prison. So I get up and use a crutch, and walk about a bit, though it’s like when we found the island, my legs don’t work properly at first. They’re going to stick some plastic bits on, so I have a whole foot again. I’ll be able to walk on it, but it will take months for the various operations and getting used to it. For now, it’s crutches.
As I hobble down the corridor Dr Jones walks besides me and says, gently: ‘It might be traumatic to talk, but it might be therapeutic. Every patient is different. Do you want to tell me the story?’
I think about the shadow, the great monster shark stalking us. But I don’t know what to say, where to begin with the story of how I killed it. Evidently all by myself.
‘I don’t think you would believe me,’
I say.
‘Try,’ she says.
I do trust her and I want to tell it all, about Aya too, because not telling is like Aya not being real. I could tell our story, and the words would make the memories live. The urge to talk is a tide. But I fight it.
*
Mum and Dad ask if I would like an audio book, to pass the time.
I ask if they’ve ever heard of the tales of Shahrazad.
‘Yes,’ says Dad. ‘More commonly known as One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights. Shahrazad is the girl who has to tell a story every evening to save her life.’
He sets up an iPad and earphones then goes online, searching. There are lots of versions. Most only cover a few examples of the stories. I want the full thing. Dad orders an audio book series. It’s more than seventy hours of listening. And even that is a shorter version of the full thing.
It begins. It’s not exactly how Aya told it, but the core is the same. The king, the executions, Shahrazad telling stories to save her sister and to cheat death.
I wait for the tale of the Sun Lord. Of the shadow, of the demon. Thiyya. Lunja. There are plenty of stories, full of magic and murder, clever thieves and brave heroes, greedy kings and cruel sultans. Djinns, demons, monsters. The stories are like the ones Aya told me in lots of ways, but they’re not the same. At first I think that’s because we haven’t got to them yet. After all, there are a thousand and one.
But as days pass, I get the feeling that maybe they aren’t in there at all.
Dad downloads some science audio books as well, popular ones about black holes, neuroscience, AI, the weird illogical quantum reality that underpins everything. I start some but can’t focus. Instead I spend hours and hours listening to Shahrazad’s tales.
The only one that is familiar in some way is the tale of Sind-bad the sailor, who found an island when he was shipwrecked. But when he lights a fire there, he discovers the island isn’t land at all, but the back of a giant, sleeping whale.
Somehow that’s like the whales we saw, and the island that was a home, but then not a home. Somehow it’s like the whale corpse we found, eaten by sharks until it sank to the ocean floor. Somehow.
iii
I have a visitor. Wilko, our captain from Pandora.
He tries to smile as he holds out his hand, but it seems forced. His skin is ash. He looks years older.
We shake. He doesn’t let go, he keeps hold of me.
‘We tried to get back to you,’ he starts. ‘The storm…’
I wriggle my hand out of his, because it’s awkward. He sits in the chair by the bed and crumples.
‘Thought you were dead,’ he says.
‘I thought you were. All of you.’
‘It’s good to see you. You made it.’
‘Yeah.’ I feel uncomfortable. I’m the one in the hospital bed, but he’s the one who looks unwell.
‘I searched for you,’ he says. ‘After we got rescued. The official effort lasted for a few weeks, but I carried on. I chartered a yacht, your parents paid. Your dad stayed in the Canaries. He wanted to come, but I told him it would slow me down.’
‘You did that?’
‘They didn’t tell you?’
‘We haven’t talked much about the time I was away. Not yet.’
Wilko nods. ‘I used the engine a lot because there was no wind. It was a waste of time, you must have been miles from where I looked. Can you forgive me?’
‘There’s nothing to forgive. You did everything you could. The storm came from nowhere. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I’m not sure people saw it that way. Not the papers, anyway.’
That’s why he’s carrying such a weight. When a fifteen-year-old boy gets lost in the Atlantic, someone has to take the rap. They chose him.
‘Well, I need to thank you,’ I say.
He’s confused. I smile.
‘If we’d got back home, if we hadn’t sunk, none of it would have happened. And I’m glad that it did.’
Now he looks at me as though I’m mad. And maybe I am.
I think about Aya afloat on the barrel, how if we’d never found each other in that desert of blue, we’d both be dead. I’m grateful for the storm, to the djinn that brought me to her and her to me.
I think of her breathing when she slept. Her voice singing and her hands painting pictures as she told her stories. Cursing me with her Berber words. Nestling with Gull in the hut. On Tanirt, wiping the sweat from my burning face.
Aya’s alive, somewhere, now. I believe that.
‘How long was it before they found you?’ I ask.
He shifts in his chair. And I think that whatever I’m going to hear won’t be easy for him to tell.
‘We ran out of water quickly. We tried catching rain but it was impossible. Whenever we opened the zip door we got flooded. We were squeezed in. It was difficult to bail. Huge waves. We were in total darkness. And going up and down, up and down…’ He stops, because he can’t not remember, and he’s living it again as he tells the story. ‘Some of the lads went mad I swear. No sleep. Afraid. Waves pitching us high, then slamming us down. We got hit, thumped and dragged under more than once, never knowing if we were coming back up. Someone said at one point we were too heavy, so…’ He pauses.
I know the choice they almost made. I can see it. Them grabbing one of the crew, forcing him out of the door and into the sea. How close had they been to that? Had Wilko stopped them? Had they stopped themselves?
He carries on. ‘But we… We braved it out.’ He looks straight at me, but he’s talking to himself. ‘Yeah, we braved it out. It was like… we came face to face with something terrible. It was like…’ He sighs loudly.
‘Go on,’ I say.
‘It was as if the storm hated us. The sea too. The wind was screaming. Those things were monsters. Sounds crazy, right?’
‘Not to me.’
‘And the sun, when that came up, it was this… thing. The sun, the sea, the sky. They were alive. Sometimes they were kind, sometimes cruel. You can’t imagine it, it was… You don’t need to imagine, do you?’
‘No.’
We laugh.
‘Then a helicopter saw us,’ he says, ‘and a boat came and got us. But we all know that story, Bill. How the hell did you survive? Start at the beginning. Actually… scrap that, skip to the bit about the shark!’
‘How d’you know about that?’
‘The nurse told me about your foot.’
But I don’t know how to begin.
‘I’m no hero, I had some help. A lot actually.’
‘You had help killing the shark?’ Wilko frowns.
I think again of the whales and the turtle we had to kill so we could live. About Gull, and the gifts of fish, coconuts and firewood. And Aya.
‘Yeah, I had help all round.’
I know he can keep a secret. I don’t feel I’m breaking my promise. So I tell him about Aya.
He listens, really listens, right to the end.
‘So she’s gone back, to her people, to fight this warlord?’
‘I don’t know. I was found alone, wasn’t I? I don’t know if she’s even alive.’
‘Do you know where her people lived, travelled, anything?’
‘She didn’t tell me much about herself. Only stories.’
‘Stories?’
‘From The Arabian Nights. Except they weren’t, really. They were her stories.’
‘You mean like fairy stories?’
I smile to myself. ‘Yeah, kind of.’
‘You know…’ He hesitates. ‘There’s no island,’ Wilko says, ‘not on any chart I looked at.’
‘Makes sense. It didn’t feel like a place that could be on any chart.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Not sure I know.’
There’s an awkward silence.
‘So, the challenge next year?’ I say.
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Yes.’
We talk a bit
more. He asks for details. All the messy, bloody, painful stuff. But I make excuses about not wanting to live through it again.
‘I understand. I should go, leave you to rest.’
‘Come again,’ I say. And I mean it, and I know he knows that; that it’s not just a thing to say.
A nurse comes and offers tea.
‘Stay,’ I say.
‘Sure, and you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’ And I see that he understands, more than Dad or Mum or Dr Jones.
The nurse gives us our tea. I sip mine.
‘I think I’ll always be there,’ I say. ‘Always on the boat. I don’t know if I’d get off, even if I could.’
The nurse checks her watch.
‘I think after your tea our patient might need a bit of rest.’
Wilko looks worried.
‘Left part of you on that boat, right?’ he says, and gently punches my shoulder. ‘Leave it there, mate. It’s not like you ever have to go back.’
iv
My foot has healed well enough to try water therapy.
I’m keen. Not just for my strength. Any excuse to get out of bed.
We go to a different part of the hospital. There’s a room with a long pool, about a metre wide. It’s got handles and a slope leading down into the water at one end.
I’m given trunks to change into and pointed to the changing room. When I emerge Dr Jones is standing with a large block in her hand like a giant TV remote.
‘You get in, Bill, and walk, and we’ll put the current on, so you’ll be walking against a stream of water. It’ll make your muscles strong again.’
I do as I’m told. The water is warm and clear.
‘Stop there,’ Dr Jones says, when I’m a quarter of the way along. She fiddles with the hand-held control. Bubbles froth and erupt from jets.
I breathe fast. The bubbles don’t feel good. It’s as if there’s something in the water. Something below the surface. I grab the rails and cling to the side.
‘Okay?’ asks Dr Jones.
‘Yeah, it just caught me by surprise,’ I mutter. Keeping hold of the rails I start to walk through the white froth. The humming is loud and getting louder. I feel hot and out of it. My breathing becomes heavy.