We Are Animals

by Tim Ewins

  9

  A cockroach

  Fishton to Norway. 1970.

  It was about 4 am when Michael started to see the dim twinkle of lights in the distance. They weren’t dead ahead of the boat as he had expected, but to the left.

  ‘Nigel!’ he shouted, but he received no response.

  ‘Jan!’ he called, this time slightly quieter, preferring to speak to Nigel, or Hylad, as Jan liked to call him. Again, he didn’t get a response. The water was fairly calm, and they were all tired from the past two days at sea. It was going to take a lot for Michael to wake them.

  He carried on forward, occasionally looking to the faint yellow glow on his left. ‘Norway?’ he thought, ‘Surely not.’ Both Hylad and himself had been checking the sextant repeatedly since they’d started the journey and it had always looked as if they were on course. Granted, they were aiming for the very south of Norway, but it seemed unlikely that they could have missed the whole country altogether.

  ‘Jan!’ Michael called again. It wasn’t Jan he wanted, really, but he realised that if he could just wake up Jan, Jan could wake up Hylad. Hylad was an absolute nightmare to wake at the best of times, let alone at four in the morning.

  Still there was no response.

  Michael was aware he’d been hard on Jan when they’d set off. He’d been so happy to be having a trip away with Hylad, and then so disappointed to hear that this lad would be joining them. But that wasn’t Jan’s fault and he’d unfairly taken it out on him.

  Michael rubbed the back of his nearly bald head and exhaled an extended ‘h’ sound, which he then watched linger in front of him in the cold air.

  He was about to call for Jan again when he saw a dark oval run across the floor.

  * * *

  Fully under the impression that he was still in Fishton, but lost nonetheless, the cockroach lifted his front half to look at the large man who’d just been shouting. The man looked back at the cockroach, disgusted. People always look disgusted, thought the cockroach. What a terribly unhappy species they must be.

  The man lifted one of his legs towards the cockroach with an angry expression. The cockroach knew that this meant it was time to scarper. He’d lost many of his friends to the feet of angry men and women. He ran to the side of the boat, banged into the wall and began to miss home – where was he? He walked to his right and banged into the same wall. He walked to his right and banged into the wall. He walked to his right and banged into the wall. It’s not easy being a lost cockroach.

  Michael grunted and put his foot back down. ‘Jan!’ he shouted, louder than before, keeping his eye on the little black dot that kept banging into the right side of the boat. After receiving no response yet again, he looked behind him towards the bedroom. ‘HYLAD!’

  He’d decided to make peace with Jan, who actually seemed quite nice, and calling Nigel Hylad seemed a good idea. There wasn’t a response as such but he heard some movement from the bedroom, so he called again. ‘HYLAD!’

  Jan emerged from the bedroom sleepily.

  ‘Why are you shouting for Hylad?’

  ‘Why do you answer to Hylad and not your own name?’

  Jan was confused. He hadn’t heard Michael’s other shouts, so this was a confusing question and he decided not to answer it.

  ‘Just wake up Hylad for me, will you?’

  ‘Hylad!’ Jan shouted.

  ‘Yeah, I tried that. Go and give him a prod.’

  Jan wandered back down to the bedroom as Michael’s thoughts turned back to the cockroach. ‘Blasted thing, where is it?’

  The cockroach turned right and banged into the wall.

  * * *

  ‘I see what you’re saying,’ Hylad pondered while rubbing his chin. ‘It is definitely land.’ Hylad and Jan were leaning on the left-hand side of the boat and looking at the row of dim twinkling lights in the distance.

  ‘But is it Norway?’ Michael asked from the helm.

  If he was being honest with himself, Hylad didn’t know whether it was Norway or not, but sometimes his confidence would portray a mere inkling as if it were fact.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘No, it’s definitely not Norway.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Jan asked.

  ‘Well, you see,’ Hylad started, biding his time so he could work out himself how he could tell. ‘Jan,’ he started again, ‘Michael and I have been using that sextant over there the whole time to navigate us to Norway. That,’ he said, gesturing to the lights, ‘is not Norway.’ He could see in Jan’s expression that this clearly wasn’t going to be enough of an explanation. ‘I certainly trust Michael’s navigation, don’t you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Jan answered, acutely aware that he’d only met Michael two days ago. ‘Although it was Michael who asked us whether the lights were Norway or not in the first place.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Hylad, and then he paused to think. ‘Well I’ve been using the sextant too,’ he said, ‘and I certainly trust my navigation, don’t you?’ He smiled at Jan and raised one of his eyebrows.

  Jan did trust Hylad. Hylad had proved himself to be very trustworthy and a good friend to Jan – the trip itself was proof of that. They both looked out to the lights again – Hylad puzzled and Jan wistful of the miscellaneous land that was laid out across the sea in front of them.

  ‘So, if it’s not Norway,’ Jan asked slowly, ‘where is it?’

  ‘Just one of Norway’s many islands, lad.’

  ‘One of the many islands of Norway,’ Jan repeated, now half in a dream. If just one of Norway’s islands can be that big, he thought, and there can be that many of them, how will I ever manage to visit everywhere in the entire world? How many people must live on that island? And yet the three of them weren’t even going to stop; it was apparently that insignificant to them. There must be so much to see on this planet and so much to learn, an unfathomable number of people to meet and far too little time to do it all in.

  A sharp wind blew across Jan’s face, forcing him to squint his eyes. He didn’t want to close them though. He wanted to watch just one of Norway’s many islands pass them in the night.

  For a while no one spoke. It was cold, but the night was calm enough to be peaceful and Hylad, Michael and Jan lost themselves in their own individual thoughts. Hylad wondered whether his assumptions about the land to the left of the boat were right, or whether they were all just watching Norway silently drift past them. If he was wrong, he would have a lot of explaining to do. Michael appeared to face the land, but he was actually looking at Hylad, quietly admiring his knowledge and assertiveness, and Jan… Well, Jan’s thoughts and emotions were everywhere – wistful and longing, excited and calm, adventurous and sleepy. The early hours of the morning whistled a soft whistle and the chilled seawater rippled calmly behind the boat, creating a constant but gentle lapping sound. Michael sighed.

  ‘So, we continue forward?’ he asked.

  Hylad turned around and he and Michael held eye contact for a couple of seconds. They both smiled.

  ‘Continue forward,’ he agreed.

  * * *

  The cockroach turned to his right and banged into a wall. He was tired of banging into the wall and he was beginning to get a headache. There had to be a gap somewhere, a way back to the familiarity of Fishton.

  Since getting lost, the cockroach had drunk well. Water was plentiful and it kept splashing over him, he’d perhaps even drunk more than he’d wanted to, but he hadn’t eaten a thing. He wanted to take a big fat bite out of one of the angry man’s toenails, but the man was wearing cockroach-killing, life-threatening boots. There was plenty of decaying wood lying around but the cockroach didn’t really like decaying wood. He was used to decent fish, moulted stray-dog hair and good, decent sewage from Fishton harbour.

  He turned to his right and banged into a wall. He turned to his right and banged into a wall, and then he
stopped.

  He recognised this wall. He’d banged into this bit of the wall before. The poor cockroach moved backwards to examine the wall with his throbbing head, at which point Michael spied him from the wheel.

  Hylad and Jan had gone back to bed for the last few hours of darkness and Michael had been left piloting again. He’d been looking for the cockroach unsuccessfully since he’d been on his own, and now here it was, in exactly the same place as he’d last seen it. But he still couldn’t reach it to kill it.

  The cockroach gave up. He’d been banging into a wall for over two hours and he simply couldn’t understand how he’d ended up at the same piece of wall. Not many people know this, but cockroaches can’t cry. This cockroach, however, at this moment, felt tears in his tiny cockroach heart.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the sun rose behind him that Michael saw the land in front of him. ‘Norway!’ he shouted, and this time both Jan and Hylad were on deck within minutes.

  ‘Can we speed up?’ Jan asked.

  Seconds later the boat started kicking water violently out from behind it.

  ‘Oh yes,’ yelled Michael over the noise, and all three of them started shouting celebratory words that, out of context, would have had no meaning.

  ‘Ooooh yes, come on!’ Michael continued.

  ‘This is it, lad!’ Hylad bellowed, ‘This is it!’

  ‘Noooorway, Noorwaaaay, Nooorwaaay,’ Jan chanted in a higher-pitched voice than he wanted and a little quieter than the other two. No one other than the three of them knew that at that very moment a calm sunrise over the east side of the North Sea was being disrupted by cheers, whoops, childish chants and a boat engine working overtime.

  Michael slowed the engine again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to ruin the party but it’s quite a long way to go on that kind of power.’ Jan and Hylad stopped cheering and once again the sunrise enjoyed a calm, cold sea to warm up.

  In fact, the land was further away than it first appeared, and it took the best part of an hour for the three of them to reach it. Jan didn’t mind. Of course, he was almost painfully excited to disembark and explore, but looking across the sea to the vast expanse of land in front of him he realised that he was seeing more of Norway than he would ever manage from the land. He soaked it up as best as he could, feeling almost scared to blink in case he missed something. The land was flat and green, with grey stone connecting it to the sea’s horizon. A few buildings clumped together on the only yellow-looking section and the occasional light turned on in one of the windows. Whatever town he was looking at, it was just beginning to wake up.

  ‘When we land, lad,’ Hylad said, interrupting Jan’s thoughts, ‘I’m going to need you to jump off with this rope and tie us up, as solid as you can. Once the engine’s off I’ll come down and help you, and Michael can sort out the last bits on the boat.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Jan, still facing the land and not taking the rope from Hylad.

  ‘You know how to tie a knot that’ll hold the boat?’ Hylad asked.

  ‘Got it,’ Jan answered again, vacantly.

  ‘I’m going to need you to make me a sandwich, clean my boots and swim the rest of the way, lad.’

  ‘Uh huh, got it.’

  Hylad looked at Michael and shrugged his shoulders with a ‘what are we going to do with him?’ smile.

  ‘Jan!’ shouted Michael.

  Jan jumped and stuttered ‘S-s-sandwi… Yep. What?’

  ‘No. No sandwich. Hylad’s telling you what to do when we hit shore, and actually, while you’re over there and you’re listening, kill that cockroach for me, would you?’

  Jan looked down by his feet to where Michael was pointing. There was a small brown cockroach next to the wall of the boat. He looked back at Michael, who was concentrating on the boat’s wheel again, and then back at the cockroach. He put his foot hard down on the ground next to the cockroach and twisted it to simulate a killing.

  ‘It’s dead,’ he said, as he bent down and tucked the live, confused but grateful cockroach into a small crevasse in the boat’s floor. Then he stood up, holding his fingers together tightly and mimicked throwing it into the sea.

  Another shout came from the wheel. ‘Nice one, lad.’

  The cockroach turned right and banged into the wall of the crevasse, before deciding once again to just stand still.

  The land was coming closer and they could clearly see the port that they were headed for. Jan was finally holding the rope and ready to hop off, eager for his first steps in Norway.

  Hylad’s boat was tiny compared to some of the large ships surrounding the port. The High-Tide Travel Guide had implied that the port would be fairly small, with a few fishing boats bobbing away (best seen at sunset), so Jan had been expecting a kind of Norwegian Fishton. Instead he found himself confronted with sea-liners, cranes and skyscrapers.

  The boat bumped against the stone wall. Jan leapt to the land and wrapped the rope repeatedly around one of the bollards. He was full of excitement to see Norway, but he was also determined to tie the knot correctly for Hylad, so he concentrated hard on getting it right.

  He was concentrating so hard, in fact, that he didn’t notice the petite lady’s hand slip inside his back-pocket. As he pulled the rope to tighten the knot he didn’t notice the hand feel around for something to take, and as he looped one last loop of the rope around the bollard he didn’t notice the hand leave his pocket with his passport.

  He did notice the shrill blow of a whistle. He lost his concentration instantly and turned around to see the girl, one hand in her pocket, standing confusingly and uncomfortably close to him. A second later he saw two men, one little and one large, running along the docks towards Hylad’s boat. The smaller of the two was blowing on a whistle with all his might repeatedly and the larger had his arm in the air and was shouting something in a language that Jan didn’t understand. Jan looked back to the girl, who was now a more comfortable distance from him, and behind her he saw a uniformed man and woman casually getting out of a police car.

  ‘Hjälp, hjälp,’ shouted the girl, and she pointed at Jan. She had obviously seen them too.

  The little whistle-blowing man and the large waving man were running at Jan up the docks and the policeman and -woman were running at him from the road.

  On an impulse, Jan reached into his pocket – to find his passport missing. He shook his head from side to side in panic. Wait, where had the girl gone? He looked around for her whereabouts when – Slam! – he hit the floor with the full force of the policewoman’s charge.

  The policeman started talking into a big walkie-talkie while the policewoman adjusted Jan’s position, so she could hold his right arm tightly behind his back.

  * * *

  The cockroach, having escaped the crevasse, ran to the side of the boat and banged into the wall. He walked to his right and banged into the wall. He walked to his right and then through a wide-open gap in the wall. He ran down the small wooden ramp to the port, expecting to see his Fishton cockroach friends. Whatever’s happened these past few days, he thought, this is not Fishton. Sadly, but still with a great, panicked haste, he looked around in the only way he knew how – a full 360-degree rotation of his body. He scuttled over to the bare-handed uniformed woman holding Jan to the ground. He climbed up Jan’s sleeve and paused by the woman’s hand to make sure he could fully savour this moment. Then he bit down hard into the softest and tastiest fingernail he’d ever dined upon and the grip on Jan’s right arm loosened.

  10

  Annan jävla självlysande

  Norway. 1970.

  Jan couldn’t understand what the policelady was saying as she held him chest down on the cold harbour ground, but he understood that he was being arrested. He couldn’t understand what the small man with the whistle and the large man (who by now had stopped waving) were saying to Hylad and Michael,
but he understood that neither Hylad nor Michael were allowed off the boat. Had he not been so scared, Jan might have appreciated his ability to follow the context without understanding any of the actual words. But he was scared, so he didn’t.

  He watched from the floor as Hylad and Michael tried to get off the boat. Hylad pushed the larger man out of the way and the little man pushed Hylad back, preventing him from stepping onto the harbour. Both Hylad and Michael were shouting for Jan, but Jan couldn’t reply through fear of the policelady who had plonked herself so forcibly on top of him.

  He saw the little man hold Hylad and Michael back from the harbour with both of his little arms spread wide. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t for the situation. Then the large man pushed the boat away from the wall with the use of his feet and an iron bollard.

  Jan saw a cockroach fall from his shoulder and onto the harbour wall, and he focused on it as he began to realise that he was going to be left in a foreign country with no friends and no passport.

  ‘They’re saying we can’t stop here, Jan, they won’t let us get off,’ Hylad shouted from the boat, and Jan’s heart sank lower than his body. ‘Don’t worry, lad, we’ll find somewhere we can stop, and then we’ll find you. Hold tight.’ Hylad continued shouting as the boat moved further and further away from the harbour, but Jan couldn’t hear anything after ‘hold tight’.

  He didn’t want to hold tight. He wanted to be on the boat with Hylad and Michael, or at home with his parents, or, well, anywhere but under the policelady in this unknown land. He didn’t have much choice though; if he didn’t want to ‘hold tight’, she would do it for him. He wasn’t going anywhere. He watched the boat he’d spent the last three days travelling on move back out of Norway, with his travelling companions on it. Jan was left behind.

  The policeman said something that Jan didn’t understand to the policelady and she said something that Jan didn’t understand back to the policeman. Had he understood, he would have heard the policeman tell the policelady that he recognised the girl who had accused Jan of theft, that she was nowhere to be seen and that maybe Jan was the victim here. Then he would have heard the policelady tell the policeman that he may well be right but this kid clearly didn’t understand what they were saying anyway so they should probably take him to the station, so he can speak with an interpreter.