Girl. Boy. Sea. Read online

  She sighed. ‘Maroc. You ask many, er, thing.’ She held a hand up and waved my questions away like flies.

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’

  We sat, staring at the sea.

  A. Long. Time.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ I blurted out. I didn’t mean to. I almost shouted it.

  Weirdly, I’d been thinking about revision of all things.

  ‘Je ne comprends pas,’ Aya said.

  ‘I’ve got work I need to do. My books were on that boat.’

  ‘Books? You are, what word… afraid because you do not have books?’

  ‘I’m not afraid! I just… I was thinking about home. What I’m doing in the next few weeks. I’m not supposed to be here.’

  She looked at me, confused at first, then she laughed, a disbelieving kind of guffaw.

  ‘It’s not funny. You don’t understand, it’s not the same for you!’ I said.

  And immediately wished I hadn’t. It was a dumb thing to say. I’m not sure she’d understood me, but I said: ‘Sorry.’

  ‘We live. We have food, aman, the storm is finish.’

  ‘I should never have got on Pandora.’

  ‘Pandora?’

  ‘Yes, the boat, the yacht I was on. It was called Pandora.’

  ‘Ah oui, Pandora.’ She nodded, as though it meant something. And that irritated me. I don’t know why.

  ‘Does it matter what the boat was called?’ I said.

  ‘Pandora, you know…?’

  ‘“Know Pandora…?” What are you talking about?’

  She sighed and frowned. ‘I cannot say, my English…’

  ‘Oh, stop apologising about your flipping English! I’m not supposed to be here,’ I said again. I still didn’t think she knew what I meant, but the look she gave me, it was as if she did know. She made a ‘tsch’ sound between her teeth, and stared out to sea and was done talking with me for a while.

  vii

  DAY 5

  I need to talk to Aya.

  I need to do the maths. About how lost we are. About how long we can survive.

  I don’t know if she thinks about it like I do.

  She must.

  ?

  When she dreams she murmurs and twists and turns. I whisper: ‘ssshhhhh’ slowly, till she settles.

  When I get narky, she tells me it will be okay.

  I don’t think she’s really thought this through.

  ‘I could understand us not being found,’ I said, ‘if it was cloudy and a plane flew over. If the sea was so rough they couldn’t see us. But not this.’ I picked up the pen and book and drew the Canaries and Africa. ‘But if they don’t find us soon it gets harder and harder. Let me show you. I reckon they have to pinpoint the last known location of Pandora. Then they’d estimate how far survivors might travel, assuming they’ve found the others and are looking for me… for us. They draw a line between the two points. Then they draw the circle, like this. This is where they’re searching.’

  I drew in the notebook.

  ‘They’d estimate how far we might travel in one day. The radius of the circle gets longer by that amount every day. The area of a circle is equal to the square of its radius times pi. So if the radius doubles, say from two to four miles, the search area will go from twelve-ish square miles to over fifty.’

  I wrote ‘one day’ by the first circle, drew a larger one and wrote ‘two days’ by the second.

  ‘How you know this thing?’ said Aya.

  ‘I’m working it out. It’s maths. I can do maths. It gets harder for them every hour. That’s a fact. Still I…’ My voice trailed away. I looked out and around. I knew the hard truth of it. Like Dad always said: facts are facts, they don’t care about your feelings. So believing we were going to be found was stupid, and getting more stupid by the hour. When I began to think about that, about the reality of it…

  ‘Je comprends,’ Aya said. She traced the larger circle with her finger.

  ‘The… word you say before? Find? It is right? Find us, oui? They will find Insh-Allah.’

  She took the pen, and wrote:

  ‘If God wills it, right? You believe that?’

  ‘It is words we say,’ she replied, not answering my question.

  ‘Right.’

  viii

  Aya. Maybe she had hope. Even belief. Insh-Allah.

  Me? I didn’t know. I felt as if I had hope. Then I’d think: Facts don’t care about your feelings. They’re just facts.

  I rowed early, trying to take us east. But it was a lot of energy for little distance and I worried I might be taking us away from the search, though it had to be better than west, which was into the Atlantic.

  But I couldn’t row once it was hot.

  I tried fishing again. The bait just fell off, again.

  I tried with no bait. That was pointless too.

  ‘I have never felt so useless in my whole life,’ I said.

  ‘You try. We try. We must.’

  So our main pastime in those hours was learning to communicate. Aya was inquisitive. She pointed: ‘This is sun. Sea. Water. Thing that is make rain, what is?’

  ‘Cloud.’

  ‘Yes, cloud.’ She made notes in my book, sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in a strange language of circles and squares and lines, more like symbols than any writing I’d ever seen. She said this was Amazigh, her language. When we’d been through everything we had in the boat, or could see or imagine was in the water – like fish and sharks and dolphins – she started on other things. Random things, anything she could think of, or draw. She drew basic shapes and guessed at the words to describe them. The names of things from the worlds we left behind: tree, flower, car, television, camel, tent, mosque, football, mountain, cake, burger. Somehow we worked out you can eat camel burger. And the fat from the hump she told me, eaten in thick slices. Turned out she knew more English than I’d thought. She’d had to warm up to remember.

  ‘Where you live?’ she said.

  ‘Hampshire. It’s in the south of England.’

  ‘Good life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I found it hard to talk about. Simple things tripped me up. I wanted to remember, but it was hard to speak of those memories without getting upset. The hunger and tiredness didn’t help.

  I described our car. How untidy my room was. I talked about my dog, Benji.

  ‘He’s a mongrel, a scrappy little thing we got from the rescue place…’ I stopped.

  ‘You are okay?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ I couldn’t say more. It wasn’t homesickness. Not just that. I was thinking: I might never see them again. That goodbye, at home, before getting in the car with Dad. Mum hugging and then another hug and too many kisses, wiped off my cheek like when I was a kid.

  ‘Benji will miss you,’ Mum had said.

  ‘I’ll miss him.’

  ‘Be safe!’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘See you in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Yeah. Bye.’

  I didn’t know it might be the last time I ever said it.

  I thought all these things, but I didn’t say them to Aya. I got back to sharing words. Words for food, London, countryside. But nothing too ‘me’.

  She learned quickly. She mimicked me, repeating each new word she learned three or four times. She taught me Berber words. But I couldn’t get them out. It was all throaty and lots of ‘acch’ and ‘szz’ and Aya laughed when I tried, and couldn’t get it right, even if I thought I’d said the words exactly as she did.

  We talked, and we made aman. Every time, before we refilled it with water, we scraped salt and stored it in a tin. Aya said we would need it if we caught fish.

  In the middle of the day I reached over the side to scoop up seawater and the light and angle were just right to show my warped reflection. My hair had bleached to straw. My face was berry red. There was brown-ness in the skin too. It wasn’t so raw.

  I woke in the night to pee.

  Aya did the same after me.


  A few clouds had come over us. The sky was hazy. It was still mean-hot, but a whispery breeze had picked up. There were soft greens and silvers on the sea. A gentle swell rolled the boat.

  Sea state 1 to 2.

  That was how it was. I noticed any little change. Every little detail.

  The sea and sky were our universe, and the boat was our world. A planet that had broken gravity and left its star. Drifting in the inky blue.

  ix

  I didn’t sleep much.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about that ratio of time and distance and the full horror of those facts. A horror that was real.

  In the dawn light I took stock and wrote it down:

  Rowboat – fibreglass hull with outer wooden shell. Pretty. But only made for ferrying to yachts or messing about near shore.

  Supplies in the hold:

  8 tins: tuna, baked beans, soup, peaches, rice pudding

  Plastic bag of lemons and 3 bananas

  I reckon we can get by on 2 tins per day between us. Not much. Just 2 days not-starving. Then one between us every day till we run out.

  6 days in all.

  I don’t know how much longer a human can survive after that.

  Equipment:

  One oar

  One seat, removed to give us more space

  Fishing line and hook on a reel

  Knife – big/sharp grabbed from Pandora.

  3 x 1 litre plastic bottles, slowly filling

  *

  I tried fishing one last time. Again the bait turned to mush as soon as it hit the water.

  ‘It’s useless. It’s no good,’ I said.

  Aya was sitting, hugging her knees and staring at me.

  ‘The fishing?’

  ‘That. Everything.’ I looked at the hook and line in my lap. Putting it away would feel like giving up. Trying again was pointless.

  ‘We must hope,’ said Aya, softly.

  ‘Don’t you get it? No planes, no boats, that storm has put us somewhere they’re not looking. We’re going to die out here.’

  ‘I do not feel this.’

  ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings.’

  ‘Facts? What is this word?’

  ‘Facts. What’s real. The truth. We’ve got eight tins left. Six days. Maybe make it last longer, starve slower. But still starving. Get it?’

  ‘You are angry because you are afraid.’ She crossed her legs, and sat up, her back rigid straight. ‘I tell you one thing is true. We are strong.’

  ‘Are we? Why? How?’

  ‘We do not have a choice. We must be strong. We are not alone. We are together. There is, um, there is truth in this? I am not saying well.’

  ‘A reason. You think there’s a reason? There’s no reason. It’s just luck. We both could have drowned. We think it’s a miracle we didn’t die, but it’s not a miracle, it’s random chance. It was random chance I was on Pandora. At the wrong time.’

  ‘Ah yes, Pandora, you know this story?’

  I sighed heavily. Was she not hearing anything I was saying?

  ‘Aya, what good is a story?’

  ‘Good? I do not know. But I ask again, you know this story?’

  ‘No. But I’m just dying to hear it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I was being sarcastic.’

  ‘You must use word I know, Bill. I do not know this sarc—’

  ‘Just tell it,’ I snapped. ‘Whatever it is. This story of Pandora, is it about a boat in a storm?’

  She smiled.

  ‘Yes, no. I say. Er, like tin but stone, shape like this.’ She mimed.

  ‘Stone tin? I dunno. Jar? Vase?’

  ‘Say vase.’

  She told me a story.

  ‘A vase is given by the gods to the girl Pandora. She believe this vase have many treasure inside. But she does not know it is a trick.

  ‘Pandora opens jar and inside is many djinns, and each djinn is a terrible thing. Each with a name. Hunger, sickness, death, hate. Many bad things. Pandora wants to close the vase, but she cannot. The many bad things, they are strong and they have sit in the vase so many years. All these bad things go into the world. But one thing is left. Hope.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s the story?’

  ‘The boat is named Pandora. The storm is the gods or maybe the gift of the gods. And what comes? Thirst, hunger, the hot sun. The djinns. But like Pandora we have hope.’

  ‘The boat is like the girl? You’re confusing a story with real life.’

  ‘Yes. My uncle he say story is not true, but it has true inside, like a djinn in a vase. You understand?’

  ‘What does your uncle know about it?’

  ‘He is the storyteller for our village.’

  ‘You live with him?’

  ‘Yes and his wife. They have a daughter also, Sakkina. She is more young than me. I love her very much.’

  She said it so matter of factly. She did have a family. She had a home. Like me.

  ‘Is it important, to be the storyteller?’

  ‘It is the most important. A story is like food or water.’

  ‘Well, I’d swap your story about Pandora for food right now.’

  ‘A story is important. Like food and aman also.’

  ‘It’s just a stupid story, if you ask me.’

  ‘I did not ask you.’

  *

  The wind died in the heat. It was scorching, so we made aman.

  But there was a problem: when I was making aman, I didn’t have the storm-cheater, so I didn’t have shade.

  Because I’d been wearing my t-shirt, my body wasn’t that burned, so in the worst of the heat that day, when the aman-maker was working best, I took off my t-shirt, soaked it in seawater and tied it over my head.

  Aya was huddled in the bow, under her cloak.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll have full bottles,’ I said. ‘Then we can start filling the barrel. Aya?’

  She nodded but didn’t look up.

  ‘You all right?’

  She nodded again, but she looked moody. I thought she was still miffed I didn’t like her story, but then I got it. She wasn’t meeting my eyes, she kept looking away because she was off the scale embarrassed about me not wearing my stupid duck cartoon t-shirt. I thought: This boat, maybe it’s two worlds. Hers and mine, and they’re different.

  Her eyes glared, she breathed deeply.

  It was tricky, her sitting silently, me roasting.

  The heat built. After twenty minutes or so my shoulders got raw.

  ‘Can we share shade, like we share food and water?’ I pointed to the cloak, and to my shoulders. I shuffled down the boat from the aman-maker towards her. Her hands gripped the cloak and pulled it tight over her.

  ‘Come on,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Non!’ She stuck her hand into the daylight. Her palm was light. Lined like a map.

  I went back to the aman-maker and sat there, stewing. I put the t-shirt back on, but my arms and neck were still exposed. Every minute the pain worsened and if I didn’t cover up, the burning would get grated-skin bad. I’d had enough. I took the knife off the aman-maker, grabbed the storm-cheater and put it over my head and shoulders.

  ‘No shade, no aman!’

  Aya frowned, sucking her cheeks in. She took off her cloak and offered it to me, glaring, saying: Either I have it, or you do.

  I took it off her. I picked the oar up off the deck too. When I sat next to her she shrank away.

  ‘Hold this,’ I said. She took the oar, reluctantly. I got her to hold it upright. I held the cloak over the side of the boat and soaked the edges so they’d be heavy. Then, using the oar as a pole, I draped the cloak over the oar and the sides of the boat at the bow.

  ‘Voilà,’ I said. ‘Un tent!’ I left her holding the oar, edged back up the boat and set up the aman-maker once more. Then I came back and squeezed in next to her and held the oar.

  She sat, leaning against the side of the boat, as far away from me as she could get. I could feel how
tense she was, stiff-still with her head turned away. It was as near as we’d been to each other since I’d found her and hauled her almost dead body into the boat.

  I tried talking, but Aya wasn’t interested. She wanted me to know she was only sitting like this because she had to.

  I couldn’t fully turn to look at her, but as she was turned away, I could see from the corner of my vision.

  The bones below her neck, the dip in the throat below them. The shadow where her skin sank into her dress. Her crossed legs. The lightness on the sole of her foot. Her hands woven together in her lap. Bands of pale skin at the base of her fingers. One, two, three, where she had once worn rings.

  After a long hazy silence she said: ‘I am hot.’

  I got out from under the tent. I looked over the side, into cool water. I stripped off my t-shirt.

  It felt like standing on a cliff-edge. I was scared. There might be sharks down there, or some other terrible thing. But I told myself we hadn’t seen a living thing the whole time. And it wasn’t like we hadn’t looked often enough. No, there was nothing to worry about. It was just water down there.

  I dived.

  The water shocked my skin, smarting cold on the burns. I opened my eyes, swam deep, then came up.

  Aya’s frowning face appeared over the side.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Wahoo!’ I cried. I swam away from the boat, all the time searching around and under, opening my eyes almost expecting to see something. But there was only water. Shafts of golden light danced in the shallows, waving and shaking as a gentle wind rippled the surface. Below, the light sank into a blue that seemed to go on forever.

  I kept swimming. With each breath, each stroke, I felt better, stretching arms and legs that hadn’t moved in days. I swam till I was calm and cool, away from the boat and down into the depths. When I turned, looking up at the floating shadow of the hull, it seemed so strange, seeing it at a distance. I suddenly felt afraid and lost and panic-swam back to the boat as fast as I could. It was not until I put my hand on its side that I felt safe.

  ‘Come in,’ I said. Aya shook her head, as if that was the maddest idea in the world. And it was mad, because I’d need her to help me get back in.