Girl. Boy. Sea. Read online

  When it was at the surface I leaned over with the turtle shell. Aya guided the line and the fish into the shell.

  We lifted it and got the fish out. It wriggled and flapped. We wrestled with it. It kept slipping from our grasp. It took both of us to nail it to the floor, where it gasped, big and flapping.

  ‘Give the knife,’ she said.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I put the knife here,’ she pointed to the gills, ‘and in head.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  And I did. I didn’t feel good about it, I didn’t feel bad either. It felt kind of serious. And I was grateful. The turtle and the fish were gifts.

  We gutted the fish. We scaled it and salted it.

  Not murderers now. Hunters.

  ‘I didn’t know I could eat raw turtle,’ I said.

  ‘Turtle, fish, meat. It is all life,’ she said.

  ‘Sure, I know. It’s not that I’m a vegetarian or anything. It’s just… well, it’s different, isn’t it?’

  ‘You kill to live. You can. Every person can. Man, woman, child.’

  ‘I know. I just didn’t think I’d ever have to.’

  ‘Many things you do not know. There are many things you do to live.’

  ‘Like Shahrazad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like you?’

  Aya threaded more offal onto the hook, and threw the line overboard again. The lure glinted as it sank into the sea. She sat, pulling the line, releasing it, pulling, releasing.

  ‘You haven’t said much, that’s all I mean. About yourself, or what happened on the boat? And before.’

  Every time I thought we were getting close, every time things between us felt good, I asked this stuff. But whenever I did, we were strangers again.

  ‘Why won’t you say? Is it too hard… what?’ I said loudly, thinking: Give me a clue, any clue. ‘Don’t you trust me, Aya?’

  ‘Yes, Bill. But you have to trust me.’

  I was full of questions. But she had this way when she wanted to shut me out.

  It was evening before we gave up on fishing. The food gave us life. I felt stronger, better. My mouth watered. We ate a little more. A treat.

  ‘What was impossible this morning is normal now,’ I said. ‘Things change fast out here.’

  *

  When it was time to sleep I moved aside, expecting her to lie down. She did, facing away from me as usual, but with her head at my end of the boat.

  I lay down too. I was dizzy, because she’d made north south and south north, by lying a different way.

  I didn’t know what this change meant or what she expected me to do. I faced her back and the thatch of hair. I reached my hand over, to hold her shoulder, maybe to hug her, but pulled back before I touched her.

  I don’t think she wanted us that close, just to be less alone.

  xiv

  DAY 11

  End of the tinned food today.

  I’ll finish the letter.

  Tomorrow.

  Or maybe the day after.

  After this tin we only have turtle and fish to eat.

  It’s not enough.

  I don’t want to die.

  Hope had evaporated, beaten out of us by the sun.

  It wasn’t about rescue any more. It was about keeping alive. Before we’d been hungry, now we were starving.

  We finished the last tin (peaches), and there’s only so much turtle and raw fish you can eat. Hunger ate me, aching through bones and guts, making me weak and confused.

  The lemon-juice-cooked and salted fish were not lasting in the heat.

  I tried to get Aya to talk. About where she was from, about what happened on the boat. But she wouldn’t. I thought maybe whatever it was that had happened was too fresh, too raw.

  She had nightmares. Lots of them. Her back would roll against me. She’d kick out, panting. I’d sit up and wake her. She’d grab my hand and arm and hold them.

  Once I tried to hug her. She started to reach up, then pushed me away, as if she’d wanted to but had changed her mind.

  *

  We woke before dawn, and watched the last star, before the light of the sun swallowed it.

  ‘The morning star,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A story. You said, before.’

  I hinted, reminding, hoping. I needed to escape the day, with its hunger and burning.

  ‘Do you think you could? I mean maybe…’

  ‘Non. Sssh.’ She held up a hand, and looked at the horizon, as though the sea held her memories of this story and she was drawing them to her.

  ‘The sun is coming. We must hide, and I will tell.’

  We sat in the tent of her cloak. Aya’s voice floated, painting a waking dream.

  She knew most of the words she needed. She asked about some, guessed them, translated them, and weaved them together. In my memory it’s a steady stream of story.

  ‘Shahrazad live many days, she told many tales in the long hours.

  ‘One evening the king say: “Why must dawn come? Your words are stars that vanish in the light.”

  ‘“Lord,” she said. “I tell you why the dawn must come. And why the morning star shine.”

  ‘She told to him the tale of Lunja…’

  The Thief of the Light

  Once, in a city beyond the sky, there lived a thief, a girl whose name was Lunja. She had no home and no family. She slept in barns with dogs. She lived on bread she stole and scraps of meat good only for flies. She was an excellent thief and a clever one, but not too greedy! Because outside the walls of the city was the truth of greedy thieves: heads on spikes, lining the road like an avenue of trees.

  Lunja owned only one thing: a ruby, big as an eye, red as fire. The stone had a name. Fire-heart.

  Fire-heart hung on a chain around her neck, beneath the rags of her dress.

  *

  Like your bag of jewels, Aya? I thought. The jewels I saw. Or dreamed.

  *

  A sultan had taken the city some years before and killed its true ruler. His wife escaped the sultan’s men and their daughter was never found.

  The sultan grew fat from taxes. He held feasts for his court and filled the palaces beyond the sky with silks and spices and statues of gold and many other things that rich people love.

  Above all he desired jewels. Diamonds, rubies, lapis lazuli and pearls.

  His coffers were full. But the sultan could never have enough. Like Lunja he was a thief, but no one could take his head and put it on a spike.

  One day he said to his people: ‘I have the finest necklaces and crowns, the most dazzling jewels. No man is richer than me.’

  But there was a vizier in court, who said: ‘But, wise Sultan, you do not have the great ruby.’

  ‘What ruby?’ demanded the sultan.

  ‘It is the brightest jewel in all of Allah’s creation. It belonged to the wife of the old ruler.’

  ‘Why has no one told me of this? Well, it is gone now!’ the sultan said. And he tried to forget about it. But the story of the ruby was like a weed around his heart. It grew and grew until it choked him.

  He dreamed of the great ruby. He tried to amuse himself by admiring the stones and cups and plates and rings of shining metal that were his and his alone. But slowly, day by day, all the sultan’s treasure became like tin or painted glass in his eyes. He dreamed only of the ruby and in his dreams the stone was bigger than an eye and shone more fiercely than any fire. Almost as fiercely as the sun.

  The sultan made a law. Each person must give up their jewels or face execution. In this way he planned to find the great ruby as well as claiming all the treasure in the land.

  The jewellers did terrible work. Over many days they removed precious stones from thousands of necklaces and rings. Then the robe-makers made a magnificent coat, decorated with the people’s jewels.

  It was said he had taken the stars and the sun and moon and the light of the water, and the scales of the fish
and the gold of sunset and wore the treasure of the world in one coat. The sultan wore the coat and paraded it through the streets.

  It was so heavy, a dozen slaves had to carry the tail. The coat was so dazzling that the people were forced to look at the ground when he walked by. Of course he believed this was because he was a great man. And so the sultan became known as the Sun Lord.

  The more the Sun Lord had, the poorer the people became. But still he was not satisfied. He desired only the ruby.

  And it was Lunja, of course, who had the ruby. But now her treasure was a most dangerous thing. How could she sell the ruby? How could she show it to anyone?

  Her secret became a curse.

  One day, Lunja sat on a roof eating a peach, watching the fruit-seller and his friends run about like mad dogs in the street below. She watched and she laughed.

  But then the Sun Lord came around the corner and the angry fruit-seller ran into him.

  The Sun Lord was furious! The fruit-seller knelt before him.

  ‘Forgive us, Lord, we are searching for a thief.’

  ‘A thief? Well, he has not come this way.’

  And someone in the crowd shouted: ‘The thief is a girl!’

  The soldiers laughed.

  ‘Where is this girl?’ said the Sun Lord. ‘She has made a fool of you. And a girl cannot make a fool of a man.’

  The man bowed ever lower.

  ‘She is a great thief, Lord. She can steal anything. No man can find or follow her.’

  Lunja loved to hear this, but she knew the man only said it so he would not seem stupid.

  She leaned closer, to hear the things they said.

  And in that second the light shone behind her and her shadow moved over the face of the Sun Lord. He looked up and he saw the ruby hanging around Lunja’s neck.

  ‘Bring me that girl,’ he commanded, ‘and the jewel she wears.’

  Lunja was as good as all the stories about her. She was fast and clever, but she could not escape a hundred soldiers.

  She was taken before the Sun Lord, fighting and twisting like a snake. They snatched the ruby from her and gave it to their ruler. He eyed the ruby with hunger, but he did not trust it. The jewel was beautiful, but it was not as bright as the ruby in his dreams.

  ‘Tell me, thief,’ the sultan spat, ‘how do you have this jewel? Tell me, or I shall put your head on a spike!’

  ‘I will tell you, O Sun Lord, the tale of Fire-heart.’

  And there in the street, before the soldiers and shopkeepers and the sultan, Lunja told her story. And…

  *

  Aya sighed, breathing deeply. A bead of sweat ran down her forehead and dripped off her nose. ‘I am weak. I cannot tell more. It is so hot.’

  I didn’t want her to stop. But it felt as if the boat might burst into flames. Or as if we might evaporate, becoming fainter and fainter, until there was nothing left.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing she finds a way to steal the coat. Am I right? She steals the jewels?’

  ‘You do not want to know, Bill, before I tell.’ Aya’s head bowed.

  I came out of the tent, into the oven of the day, and got an empty bottle, filling it with seawater. We poured it over our heads.

  I checked the aman-maker. Emptied it and cleaned out the salt.

  We drank a little more. It was impossible not to. My tongue was sandpaper. My limbs were lead.

  Aya said we must be grateful for each day. But it wasn’t as though we were staying alive. More slowly dying, and that’s different.

  At least we had stories. But she couldn’t tell them then. It was too hot even for that.

  *

  Later, when the day was cooling, she watched me writing her story in the notebook.

  ‘Bill, this book. If boat comes, men cannot read this. No one sees this. No one. Tell no one of me. You understand? It is important. Make swear.’

  ‘I don’t put much in there, I haven’t written anything about you.’ (A lie, I had.) ‘It’s just a record of the tins, the number of days, a rough calculation of distance we might have travelled, that sort of—’

  ‘Swear!’

  ‘Okay, I swear.’

  ‘Here.’ She took the knife from the aman-maker and nicked the end of her finger. A round ruby of blood sat on the tip. She pressed it to her heart. ‘Like this.’

  ‘Trust me. I won’t tell anything you don’t want me to.’

  ‘You do not say. You swear!’ She offered me the knife.

  I thought: Maybe if I do this, she’ll trust me a bit more. I took the knife, I was clumsy with it, there was a spike of pain and a bigger cut than I planned, and a lot of blood. I pushed it against my heart and watched it stain my t-shirt dark red.

  ‘I swear,’ I said.

  ‘Bon.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Some peoples, I do not want them to know I am alive. If we are found because you are an English boy it will be in newspaper and television, yes? You understand?’

  ‘Yes. I understand. But why?’

  ‘When I go home I must be like a thief in the shadows.’

  ‘Like Lunja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  The sky was clear and lit with stars. There was a low moaning. We listened hard. It stopped. Then it came again. Thrubbing. Ten seconds or more.

  ‘I think it’s a lighthouse foghorn,’ I said. But the horizon was a crisp line of black sea against the night. And it wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard.

  The sound came again, becoming a groaning stretched-out cry.

  It got louder still. Closer. It was no boat, no foghorn or any man-made sound. It was above us and inside us and coming from below. The groan of some unseen beast.

  It was so powerful the boat trembled.

  Again. Louder. Closer. I could feel it in my gut.

  Aya sat up and gripped my arm.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It stopped.

  I saw a shadow ahead of the bow, a crooked triangle rising out of the water, sinking back in. I didn’t say anything. I wanted to be sure of what I’d seen.

  A huge shark’s fin.

  The sound came again. The boat shook hard as though it might rattle apart. The sound vibrated through the boat, through my skin, into my bones. Aya let go of me and curled up in the middle of the boat, hugging her knees.

  ‘What is this?’ she moaned.

  I scanned the sea for that fin. Like the shadow before, I wanted to see it, and didn’t want to see it at the same time.

  It broke the surface.

  ‘No!’ Hot lead filled my gut.

  The fin rose and rose, out of the water.

  ‘Look, Aya, look!’

  The fin was on a giant back. It phooshed through its blowhole, sending a plume of mist high into the air. Behind it another back soared from the sea. Like an island, it was so vast.

  The thrubbing sound was joined by another, and another. And pitching and squealing. The sea, the boat, us: caught in a storm of sound.

  ‘They’re whales, Aya!’ The closest arced over and dived, raising its V-shaped tail it smacked it down on the surface of the sea: thwump, making a wave that travelled along the water, till it hit the boat.

  Aya shrieked with joy and wonder. We reached out and held each other.

  A pale shape drifted through the water beneath us. Too close. I clung to Aya, she clung to me, shaking.

  ‘I thought it was monsters, but it is… I never see this!’ she whispered.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘They won’t hurt us.’ But was that true? One nudge, one whack of a tail, is all it would take.

  White skin passed beneath us again. It swam up. A young one, smaller than the others, but still enormous next to our boat. Its head rolled over. Its giant flipper came out of the water like an arm waving. Its eye twinkled. It whistled and squeaked.

  ‘It’s talking to us,’ I said. Aya just clung on, trying to steady her breathing.

 
A low desperate call sang out.

  The young whale sank into the darkness below.

  There were no more arcs or phooshes for a minute or so, then, when they did appear, they were further away.

  ‘I think they’re—’

  The sea erupted. The whale launched like a rocket. Right in front of us, filling the sky.

  It crashed, in a storm of froth, sending a tidal wave right at us.

  The boat lifted, pushed back by a force so sudden and strong the aft dipped in the sea. Water smashed around us and on us, flooding in.

  The boat rocked, lurching and shocked.

  I grabbed the turtle shell and started bailing as quickly as I could. ‘If that happens again we’ll sink.’

  Aya didn’t budge. She scanned the horizon, breathing loudly.

  I saw an arc in the distance. Heard a phoosh.

  ‘I think will be okay,’ Aya said.

  And they were gone.

  When all the water was out of the boat I put the shell down and went to her. I held her hand.

  ‘That was amazing, wasn’t it?’

  Aya turned to me with eyes that took a while to see, as if she was waking from one of her nightmares.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I said.

  She threw herself at me, burying her face in my neck.

  I was more shocked by that than the whale breaching.

  We held tight, our soaked bodies locked together.

  xv

  We held each other all night.

  I didn’t know her culture or customs. I thought maybe even this might not be okay. But in that place, rules had no meaning.

  *

  Day 12.

  Or 13?

  14?

  I’m losing track.

  We are starving.

  *

  The sun punished us. There was no hiding, not even in the shade.

  Neither of us had the strength to talk. We could barely breathe. We were like beaten dogs, bent over with hanging heads.

  We made aman. We drank it. Made it. Drank it. It was never enough.

  We had no fish and hadn’t caught one in days.

  Dots danced before my eyes. I struggled to stay awake. When I slept I had nightmares.

  The sun became an evil sultan, hammering down.

  ‘Bill… Bill!’