I was running before anyone could stop me, before I knew myself what I was going to do.
They shouted at me but I was gone. There was no way I was going with them. I knew J.J. had told me not to run. But I had to. I had to find Mother.
Somehow I found my way back through the myriad little streets and down to the harbour. By now there were hundreds of people there, lining the harbour walls, and more crowds down on the beach, all clustering around Sunshine, walking round her and touching her, bending over, taking pictures and selfies.
Then I saw the name in big gold letters above the windows of a fish and chip café. ‘Owzat’.
And there they were! Mother and Uncle Said were standing side by side in the crowd by the harbour wall outside the café. I stopped running. I needed time to think, to make up my mind what to say. They were looking down over the quayside at Sunshine, like everyone else. They still hadn’t seen me.
They didn’t notice me until I was right beside them, until I spoke.
I spoke to her first in Pashto, then in English. ‘Mor,’ I said. ‘Mother, I’ve been looking for you, and you haven’t been easy to find.’
She was older, her hair whiter. I did not want to let her go. She kept holding my face in her hands and kissing me. She could not speak for crying, and neither could I.
Then she was pushing me away from her, taking me by the shoulders and turning me round. Standing in front of me was Hanan, still taller than me, Hanan, my beautiful sister – alive, alive!
We were still hugging some time later when the police officers arrived with J.J. I saw there was movement shifting inside her cagoule pocket. I was willing Zaya and Natoban to do as they had been told and keep their heads down. They kept their heads down too, whilst everyone in the crowd was beginning to realise who this young woman was in the yellow cagoule. The news was spreading fast around the harbour. People came running from all over. There was cheering and clapping, and soon the phones were out, and everyone wanted to take photos. Then she was being carried around the harbour on the shoulders of a couple of burly bearded fishermen.
We were in the fish and chip café, with Mother and Hanan and Uncle Said and one of the police officers, when J.J. came back a while later and found us. The other police officer was with her. She patted her pocket reassuringly and nodded at me. She told us that it had all been arranged with the police and the immigration people, that I could stay with Mother and Uncle Said whilst everything was sorted out and all the right paperwork was done. Then the TV and radio people arrived. There were cameras flashing and clicking, and endless interviews in the fish and chip café with J.J. and with me. She was the hero of the hour. She was the one who had rowed all around the world, the first woman ever to do it.
But all the time she made out to them that I was the hero, that without me she would never have got home. She told them all she had hurt her wrist and could not row, and how we had rowed the last fifty miles together, and how glad she was that I had found my family, and found a home with them here in Mevagissey, in a safe place where there was peace, where people were kind, and where she knew people were kind to strangers.
Then she said, and only four of us there know why she said it – Zaya, Natoban, J.J. and me – ‘I think we all have to live for one another, don’t you?’
So that’s how I come to be writing this now, many years later, sitting in my room above the fish-and-chip café, looking over the harbour in Mevagissey. I play cricket for the local team and can hit the ball harder, and bowl faster, than any of them. They call me Tiny – again! – but I don’t mind. I long to tell them sometimes that I was once a giant in another place, a boy giant, but a giant in a different world. They’ll know when the book comes out, if it ever comes out.
I spend my days out at sea with Hanan in Uncle Said’s fishing boat. Mevagissey is our proper home. The café is a proper family business. Hanan and I fish the fish – crab, lobster, herring, mackerel, sole – but mostly cod and haddock because fish and chips is by far the most popular choice on our menu.
Uncle Said cooks behind the counter – he likes to sing as he cooks; he sings croakily as he sizzles!
And Mother and Hanan look after the customers in the café. Their English is terrible, Uncle Said’s is better. But mine is perfect, though some people say I speak in rather a strange old-fashioned kind of way, as people might have spoken in England hundreds of years ago. Lilliputian English, old-fashioned? How dare they!
And as for Zaya and Natoban, still my two best friends in all the world, in both the worlds I have lived in, I still see them from time to time, but not at home, not in Mevagissey, not any more. And thereby hangs another story.
To begin with they tried to live with me up here in my room, where they were safe enough from the cats and dogs that wandered the streets outside, from the gulls that were quite capable of picking them up and carrying them off, from the cars in the streets. They were safe, too, from giants who strode with their great heavy feet through those streets. I knew all too soon, as they did, that long-term this could be no life for them, imprisoned as they were in my room with me. I worried about them if ever I had to go out. Natoban in particular was longing to go out with me. He would spend long hours sitting at the window, gazing out to sea. They could not stay with us, I knew that. They needed a proper home, and I knew it could not be with me and Mother and Hanan and Uncle Said. They loved having them in the house – once they had got over the surprise of meeting them, once they knew their story and mine. They were part of the family now, but we all knew it could not last.
The days they looked forward to most were Mondays when the café was closed, and we would all go out in Uncle Said’s rickety old car that smells of fish. Our favourite trip was to Zennor, a little village not far away, where there was a high rocky moor, from where you could see the sea all around, a wild, windy empty place. We would often take a picnic up there. Zaya and Natoban and I could run off together, and we could all feel we were back on Lilliput again, and I could feel I was a giant again.
Then on one Monday evening, up on the moor above Zennor, Mother and Hanan and Uncle Said and I were packing up and getting ready go back home, when we realised the two little ones weren’t with us. We called out for them, looked everywhere. I checked in the picnic basket they liked to ride in sometimes. But they were nowhere. We stayed until dark calling for them, and calling for them. Hanan and I were up on the moor all that night, searching for them, waiting for them, calling for them. Uncle Said drove back to Mevagissey and brought us back a tent and all we needed to sleep up there.
Night after night we were there. We were not going to leave without them. Hanan stayed with me most of the time, and Uncle Said and Mother would come out every morning when they could to look for them with us. We searched in amongst the rocks, along the banks of every stream, and climbed every hill on the moor again and again. My voice was hoarse with shouting, my eyes ached sometimes with crying. They were raw.
After two or three days I knew the worst must have happened. A fox had caught them, or a buzzard, or a stoat. Or they had strayed down on to the road and been run over, or maybe they had fallen into a pond, or perhaps they had got lost in a mist and wandered off the moor on to a farm, and a cat or a dog had taken them.
Day after day I came looking for them, week after week. J.J. would come over to help me whenever she could, from her home in Salcombe. Time and again she would come up to Zennor to help us look for them. I was giving up any hope of finding them, but J.J. never gave up on anything. She wasn’t like that, and neither was Hanan. They would not let me give up and the search went on.
Both J.J. and Hanan were with me that morning. The three of us were lying awake in our tent. The wind was up. There was a strange sound outside. We thought at first it was the tent whipping and whining in the wind. We looked out. And there they were, Zaya and Natoban standing there, looking at us and smiling. They were not alone. Around them were gathered a dozen more little people, all of them staring
at us. We stared back. ‘Hello,’ said Zaya. ‘What are you doing up here?’
I was almost angry. ‘Looking for you,’ I told her.
‘We’re fine,’ Natoban said. ‘We’ve found some friends our own size. No cars up here, no dogs, no cats, and we can go where we want. We look after one another, just as we did on Lilliput.’
‘Who are these people?’ I asked him.
‘They call themselves Spriggans,’ Zaya told me. ‘They’ve lived up here for thousands of years, long before giants like you came along. They know how to live amongst big people. They love stories like we do, and they’ve got lots of them to tell, and so have we. We’re living up here with them now. Is that all right?’
I didn’t know what to say for a while. ‘Are you happy?’ I asked them.
‘Very,’ said Zaya. ‘They look after us very well. We look after each other. It’s our home now. Don’t worry about us. And you can come and see us any time you like.’
So that’s what we did, what we still do. They found their world. I found mine. Different worlds they may seem to be, but they’re not. We all live in the same world and I love it that way. I love the memories I have of Lilliput and Blufescu, I love the sea and the fishing, and all my family and friends in Mevagissey, and my dear Zaya and Natoban up on Zennor moor, and J.J.
One day, I want to row with her back to Lilliput to show her and Hanan the place where I lived, where I grew up. J.J. says she thinks she can work out where it is. She has a record of the longitude and latitude in her logbook, the exact spot in the ocean where we met by chance that day. She says all we would have to do is row due west from there, and sooner or later we would be bound to find Lilliput. It would be an adventure, she said, and she likes adventures. We’ll take Zaya and Natoban with us, if they want to come. But that’ll be another story, a whole other story, maybe for another book. It’s got to happen first.
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