I noticed that the Captain stayed well clear of Kellan and made no attempt to be in charge or to lead. The only adult he regularly spoke to was Hifa, because she was doing most of the work of setting up and checking the nets and lines.
‘What do you talk about?’ I asked her one night. By tacit agreement, the rest of the community let us use the back of the lifeboat as our place to sleep when it wasn’t raining. When it rained they needed the cover. So although there was no privacy by day, we were able to be intimate in the evening. That meant that the days had a shape, company and work by light and just the two of us by night.
‘Nets. Ropes. Fishing. He knows about it, he used to fish back where he came from.’
I thought about that.
‘Does he ever talk about it?’
I felt Hifa shake her head in the dark.
‘He never talks about the past, or the Wall, or anything. Just nets and rope and fish.’
We lay there listening to the creaking and slapping of the rafts and the water, the faint high note of the wind which, in the lee of the island, we could hear but not feel. You had to take the good moments where you found them, and since memories were painful, and hopes were elusive and tormenting – what if we could sail to here, what if there were no Wall there, what if what if what if – you tried to make the most of the good moments you could find in the present tense. We had some, there in the back of the lifeboat, floating, amniotic, in the fuggy air under the awning. When I fell asleep, I always had the same dream, of fire: of looking at a fire in a grate, or a cooking fire, or a bonfire; watching the flames flicker and change shape and feeling their warmth and their glow and thinking, that was funny, it was such a long time since I saw fire that I’d forgotten what it was like, I really missed fire, I’m so glad it’s back in my life, I must never take it for granted again, there’s really nothing in the world as lovely as a fire, as giving and generous, as sure to make you feel safe, I’m so glad about the fire. When I woke from that dream there were always a few moments when I felt as if the fire were still real, as if I could still feel its glow, still see the flicker, still feel warm and secure, and those moments were the best times I had on the sea.
21
The prevailing wind towards and around the island was very consistent, and came from the south-west with variations in intensity but not much change in terms of direction. It was this which gave us safety in the lee shore and made it possible for the floating community to exist. That’s not to say the wind was always completely identical. From the south-west, broadly speaking, yes, but there were many small shifts of a few degrees here, a few degrees there, like someone changing position in their sleep, and they all had a different effect on the rafts, changing the sway and shift of the planking. Some of the rhythms were gentle and regular and easy to get used to, but some of them were jarring and dissonant, making the rafts buck and move out of sync with each other. The members of the community all seemed to have got used to this a long time ago, but I found there were times when I could hardly stand, let alone move, let alone do anything difficult or fiddlesome. I hadn’t ever felt sick on the boat, but there were moments on the rafts when I was queasy; it was the chaotic nature of the motion that did it. Hifa noticed but she could tell that I was trying to keep it to myself and she was sympathetic. She had been seasick on the lifeboat but was fine on the rafts.
I stopped counting the days but I think it was a few weeks after we joined the community that the weather took its first proper turn for the worse. There had been bursts of rain, just enough to give a feel for what the winter might be like, but nothing really bad. The night before the storm was completely still and clear. According to Kellan that was a warning sign of bad weather ahead. In the morning we saw thick banked black clouds at the horizon, moving not in the usual direction, straight towards us from the south-west, where we would be protected by the island, but at an angle, directly from the south. That was bad news, because it meant the weather would be coming at us more laterally than it ever had before. We started to prepare by pulling in lines and ropes and nets, fastening down the tops of the water containers so they wouldn’t spill or be contaminated by salt spray. People worked quickly and knew what they were doing; this wasn’t their first time. The girls went round the rafts picking up any loose objects and putting them away. I went to the far end of the rafts where Kellan was looking at the sky. Above us the clouds were slate grey, then a little further they were dark grey, then black. He saw my expression and put his hand on my arm.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. I wanted to believe him but the fact that he’d felt the need to say it meant that I didn’t. My worry, the obvious worry, was that the weather’s change in direction, combined with the strength of the winds and waves, would be so strong that the rafts were torn from their anchorage and broken apart. Realistically, that was likely to happen one day, so why not today? I stood and watched for a while. The storm came closer and the swell began to move differently. The rafts started to float and dance. The teenagers looked like I felt, apprehensive, but the younger children thought it was fun and funny; they giggled and ran about and flicked bits of water at each other, and ignored the adults who tried to grab them and get them to calm down. They only stopped messing around when the bad weather hit, which it did suddenly and frighteningly. The storm began with a sheet of wind and rain racing sideways at us, visible from at least a kilometre away. The slanted stinging rain drenched us at a forty-five-degree angle, and the ocean hit the rafts with a giant rolling punch from below. The rafts soared and buckled and were pulled apart from each other, but held. I was still standing next to Kellan. He was calm but intent, looking in the direction from where the weather was coming, squinting a little against the rain and wind.
That first impact made me think we could not survive the storm – that the community would be ripped apart. I walked as fast as I could over the kicking, plunging rafts back to our lifeboat. I climbed aboard and got in under the awning in the back of the boat, where Hifa and Hughes were already sitting. I wondered for a moment where James and the Captain were riding out the storm. I did not think it would sink us, sink the lifeboat, but I did think it would mean we couldn’t stay together as a collective; the rafts and boats would be scattered over the seas and we would have to look for each other or for a different place of temporary safety. The sensation of despair, which I had been holding at bay ever since we had been put to sea – I suppose because we had been so busy with the work of survival – came back in full force. I was sure the rafts would be forced apart.
I was wrong. The storm never built from that first great thrash. The wind and rain came again and again, but did not grow in intensity and was never more than a series of frightening but brief squalls. We braced ourselves for the weather to build to a crisis, but it didn’t happen. The squalls came at irregular intervals, sometimes no more than two minutes apart, sometimes with lulls of fifteen or twenty minutes, followed by a longer and more violent but still manageable gust. I think the island deflected just enough of the storm’s force, changed its nature just enough, to save us. I felt sick but didn’t actually throw up and was helped (I’m not proud of this) by the fact that Hifa began to look a little green too.
Three small squalls came together, each a little longer than the last, the waves rocking us so little now that no new water was being splashed in. There was a pause of more than twenty minutes and then the shortest, smallest burst of wind and rain so far. The storm was passing. We had survived. The rafts would not be torn apart. The community would keep going. I could have cried with relief. Hifa was still looking green but I reached out and squeezed her arm and got up and left the awning and then left the lifeboat to go and look around.
Kellan was still standing on the side of the rafts closest to the island, closest to the storm. He couldn’t have been there the whole time, I thought, that would be superhuman; he must have kept coming in and out as the squalls moved on. Elsewhere on the rafts people were coming out of
shelters, stretching, beginning to tidy up and straighten up. In the distance the skies moved from a much lighter grey than before to, at the horizon, a paint-roller swipe of bright blue. He turned to me and smiled.
‘Told you,’ he said.
‘I was worried,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But look.’ He held out his hand and pointed at the horizon as if he owned it, still smiling, then slowly swung his extended arm from one side of the horizon to the other, and then kept turning and pointing, a single broad swipe, doing a full 360-degree tour of the sea and sky, as if he were revealing his handiwork, the world he had made. When he got to the seaward side of the boat, in the direction where the storm had gone, his face changed, and because I was looking at him and laughing, it was as if what happened began there, with his expression changing, looking, for the first time since I had known him, not just frightened but more than frightened, aghast, blanching, horrified. I turned to look too and I saw, coming in our direction into the weather and the wind, battering against the waves, a big ship, heading straight at us. A gust of wind and rain, the final one of that storm, came and went, and I stood there and got soaked while it passed, wishing that when the sky cleared, the impossible boat would have gone and we would laugh about the shared hallucination. My heart was beating so fast that my chest hurt. It was a ghost boat, something from a dream or nightmare, a phantasm of the rain and mist. We were seeing things. But the squall moved past us and when it did the ship was still there, still coming, still pointed towards us like a knife. It had lights on the mast and rigging; the same five lights in a triangular pattern that I had seen weeks before, at night on the open sea. This was the same ship.
22
My first thought was: maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe they’ll just want to join us … but that didn’t make sense. There could be any number of people on a ship that size, and at the fewest there wouldn’t be fewer than say fifteen or twenty, and fifteen adults was too many. Maybe they were coming in peace? But there was, even at first sight, a feeling that they weren’t coming in peace. If that ship had been a person they would have been staring at us as they approached, bristling with aggression, looking for any excuse to start a fight.
Kellan did not move and did not speak. He just kept looking at the ship. The rest of the community was now seeing what we were seeing. Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare. Even the children stopped what they were doing. There wasn’t a face that didn’t seem racked with apprehension. I had sometimes imagined that other arrivals might come to the rafts, but had pictured them arriving the same way we came in the lifeboat, desperate and barely surviving and grateful for any respite from the sea. We had been even more grateful when we found we could be useful and had skills and manpower to contribute. I could imagine a repeat of that. I hadn’t imagined this, though. What this ship looked like, more than anything else, was a warship.
The Captain came out from one of the shacks in the middle of the raft and took in what was happening. He went to the end of the community closest to the approaching ship. It was now about two kilometres away. Visibility had been poor during the storm. This ship could only have come across us by chance, just as it had only been by chance that our lifeboat had come to that place. Unless they had naval charts and were looking for the island; in which case they might be professionals, might even be Guards. Perhaps they were looking for us? Our case had been debated, somebody in authority had decided we had been treated unfairly, and the Guards had been sent to look for us and bring us home? This wild thought came to me from nowhere and I suddenly felt sick with hope. Guards sent to save us, Guards sent to save us, I told myself, my mouth dry with fear and longing. I wanted to tell Hifa but knew that I couldn’t because I was probably wrong and if I was I would have done a bad thing, given her the hope and then given her the despair. So I stood and stared, speechless, with the rest of them, my feelings strobing between fear and hope. We had no way of defending ourselves, there was nothing we could do.
The Captain was the only one of us who seemed to have a plan or any sense of what to do. He moved down the rafts. He was even more heavy-footed and off-balance than I was on the moving surface. He got to the very far end and stood with his hands on his hips. Hifa had come over to me and Kellan and she asked a question with her expression. I had no answer. We waited. The ship came closer, plunging up and down, the spray over its bows grey-green-white as it smacked into the waves. James and Hughes came over to us too and we all stood together. The squall which had hit us a minute or so before now hit the boat and again I had that childish wish that when it cleared, the ship would have vanished. A magic trick, here one second and gone the next. But when the rain and wind passed, there it still was.
‘Let’s go over to that end,’ said Hifa. So that’s what we did, picking our way over the rocking rafts, in between members of the community, towards the Captain. I can’t explain the instinct to go and stand with him, other than that it had been ingrained on the Wall, the idea that we were Defenders and that’s what Defenders do, you stand there and wait to see what comes. The community looked at us as we walked past. They were standing still and staring; nobody else had moved since they saw the ship. We got to the Captain when it was only a couple of hundred metres away. At closer range, it looked smaller: not a huge ocean-going ship but a practical working boat about the size of a fishing trawler. There were men on deck; fifteen or so. There was no flag or insignia or writing or identification of any kind. I felt something inside me curdle. My heart, already racing, sped up and was now beating as fast as I had ever known it. These were not Guards. These were not our people.
The ship slowed as it got closer to us and came to a halt, with engines running to hold it in place, no more than fifty metres away. At that range the deck loomed far above us and I could only see four men standing at the bow. Three of them had rifles slung over their shoulders. Even with the noise of the wind and waves and the engines, they were well within calling distance, but they didn’t say anything. The Captain, at the very end of the rafts, spread his arms to their full width. You could see that the gesture meant: we have no weapons. We are at your bidding. He held the pose for all of ten seconds.
One thing you learn in combat is that when people are shot in the head, they are there one moment, and then they cease to exist. They drop in a way that no living thing drops; they fall to earth like inanimate objects, because that is what they now are. The transition from life to death is instantaneous. That is what happened to the Captain. He seemed to fall before the noise of the shot. He had hit the deck of the raft before I understood what had happened. They had killed him just to make a point. Just like that – gone. I heard Hifa make a noise between a gasp and a cry and heard someone else swearing and realised that it was me.
The ship, what we now understood was a pirate ship, manoeuvred until it was sideways on to the rafts. There were the four men at the bow of the ship and about ten or a dozen armed men standing at the side, pointing weapons at us. They lowered their anchor and a ladder and an inflatable boat and eight of them got in it and crossed over to us. Hifa and I bent down to the Captain’s body, lying on the floor of the raft in one of the positions that only the dead adopt, his arms bent under him, his legs folded backwards under his hips, his head, what was left of it, bent down over his chest.
I say ‘his’ – was he a he any more? Probably not. But it is difficult to think of a dead body, a body so recently dead, as an ‘it’. For a few seconds I thought of all the things the Captain had been to me, the different selves he had incarnated, from my first minutes on the Wall through the weeks of duty to fighting together to his betrayal to the time at sea; and through all of that the side of his life I had never seen and did not know, the place he had come from, his family, his people, his overt treachery and secret loyalty and the terrible consistency of his courage and his betrayal. The bravest man I would ever know, and the most loyal, and the biggest traitor. He had at one point been the person I admired most; he had
saved my life; he had done me more harm than anyone else; if he hadn’t directly murdered me, he had come very close. For a moment I felt the force of all those things he had been, ebbing out on the floor of a raft on the open sea. And then the pirates arrived. We were still crouched over him when the first of them got onto the raft and came over to us. He pointed his gun, a semi-automatic rifle, at us and wiggled it from side to side. The gesture clearly meant: step away. Hifa and I got up and moved back a couple of paces. The pirate raised his head and two of the other pirates came over. All three of them slung their guns over their shoulders and they stooped and picked up the Captain’s body and pushed it over the side of the raft. It floated for five seconds and then slowly sank.
The first pirate pointed his rifle at us again and jabbed it backwards. We turned and saw that all the other members of the community had gathered in the middle section of the rafts, at the demand of the five other pirates who were walking around the rafts, looking into shelters, opening boxes and water catchments. It was clear that they were taking a rough inventory of everything we had. The thing they looked at longest was our water. They took a long hard look at the stores of firewood and the community’s fuel tank, opening it, tapping it on the side and listening to the echo. That made sense. Water and fuel, the two most valuable commodities out on the sea. The pirates who were taking the inventory called the first pirate over in a language I did not recognise. He went across to them and they talked and pointed. I could see that our supply of water was big news to them. Three of of them tried our drying fish and gulls and passed them back and forwards between them, with commentary.
The Wall Page 17