Just After the Wave

by Sandrine Collette

  “How long have we got?”

  “Gosh, more than an hour. You have time to catch loads!”

  Noah laughs, spreading his arms.

  “This much?”

  “If you can.”

  And then.

  There are times when nothing goes as it should.

  Because, for a start, the fish aren’t biting. No matter how they bait the hooks with bits of raw potato, and cast to the left, to the right, or let the lines trail behind the boat, all they manage to catch after all that is a tiny little mackerel no bigger than a hand. Noah gets annoyed.

  “It’s because of the oars, and the noise they make!”

  “The other day I was rowing, too, and you caught some,” says Louie. “Am I supposed to stop just so you can fish, is that it?”

  They don’t speak for a few minutes. Noah has pulled in his line, and sits with his arms crossed.

  “You’re not going to catch any like that,” hisses Louie.

  “They’re not biting, anyway. It’s not a good day.”

  “But look,” says Perrine, “we’re almost at the island. And . . . oh!”

  “What is it?”

  She starts whispering suddenly.

  “There must be people there, you can see a hut.”

  “Why are you whispering?” asks Noah.

  “We don’t know who it is.”

  “So?”

  “What if they’re people like Ades?”

  Noah stiffens. You think so? She doesn’t answer. Louie stops rowing. All three squint into the distance, trying to make out something more precise, something to reassure them, a family waving their arms, a dog playing.

  “Do you see any people?”

  “No. Just a hut.”

  “Maybe there’s no one there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What should we do?”

  Louie wrinkles his nose: night is falling, they can’t see very well.

  “We’ll stop here.”

  “Here?” exclaims Perrine.

  She spreads her arms, doesn’t need to say any more: to anchor here, only a few hundred yards from the shore, when in fifteen minutes they could have their feet in the sand. Louie shakes his head:

  “We don’t know.”

  “But what if there’s no one?”

  “We don’t know. In any case, we don’t have any fish. We can fish tomorrow morning and when we’ve caught some we’ll go on to the island, okay?”

  Not okay. But it’s pointless to say anything.

  “You always get to decide,” protests Noah.

  “Because you two don’t even know what you’re doing.”

  “That’s not true.”

  A jab with an elbow, a punch. Perrine raises her hands, Stop it! They turn their backs on each other again, until they think they see some slight movement on the island. All three hurry to kneel by the side of the boat, but darkness is falling over them, hiding the little coast with each minute that goes by. So they lie on the floorboards, gazing at the stars, dreaming about tomorrow, and the feeling of warm sand between their toes, and how when at last they can stretch their legs they will run, and there will be grilled fish, and they picture the fruit they will find—some sort of impossible Eden, the kind you imagine one evening until at daybreak you are disillusioned; every time. Sleep comes late; they’re too tired, and too excited. The hens have been asleep for a long time, their heads tucked beneath their wings.

  Very short night. Very faint nudge against Louie’s shoulder. Noah murmurs, Can we start fishing?

  “But it’s not light out yet,” murmurs his older brother, eyes half open as he senses the gray dawn; in the distance, strands of yellow cloud mingle with the rays of the rising sun.

  “Yes it is, almost. This is the right time to go fishing.”

  What does he know, Noah, he’s just saying things. But Louie is too sleepy to protest, and he sits up slowly, at the same time as Perrine, who gives a stretch. The rocking of the boat lulls them, a regular cadence, left, right, left, right. Noah doesn’t feel seasick anymore.

  “Do we have anything to eat?” Louie asks Perrine.

  She rummages in the bag, hands each of them an egg.

  “Yuck,” says Noah. “Eggs again.”

  The hens look at them with their round eyes, heads tilted, waiting for the shells. Perrine pours them some water in a saucer and strokes the head of one of them.

  “You see, they’re tame, now.”

  They gaze fascinated at the sunrise, minute upon minute, second upon second even, as the sphere of light appears from below the horizon. The dazzle of sunlight on the water forces them to close their eyes from time to time, they shield them with their hands, and eventually turn away.

  On the other side is the island. They can see it better now. An island with greenery: trees, and thickets. Their stomachs rumble at the thought they might find fruit; they wish they could be there already. They stare avidly at the hut, but there’s still no sign of movement anywhere around it. And yet yesterday, they thought there had been.

  Illusion.

  “Come on,” says Louie, “let’s try and catch some fish first.”

  So again they cast their tiny lines, little nylon threads which the sea encloses and strokes, their colorless lures floating and bobbing on the surface. But Noah was wrong: once again the lines remain slack. Sometimes a line dips down and they sit up and pull it towards them—only mirages, every time, the hook is empty and the potato bait remains intact.

  “Who cares about the fish,” Noah complains after a while.

  But Louie is intractable.

  “We have to keep trying.”

  “Never mind,” says Perrine. “If we can go cook the potatoes we didn’t have time to do before we left, that would already be a good thing.”

  “Let’s wait for a while.”

  “I’m sick of this,” Noah sighs, bringing his fishing pole back on board.

  “With you it’s just the same as with mushrooms, if there aren’t loads of them right away, you get annoyed.

  “Yeah, but I don’t like mushrooms, anyway.”

  The boy leans over the edge, toward the anchor chain. Shall I pull it up?

  “Go ahead,” says Louie, exasperated, “we’ll keep going for a while.”

  They hear the familiar creaking, Noah’s breathing imitating Pata’s and Louie’s, Heave, he says, and Perrine helps him with the anchor, at that very moment out of the corner of his eye Louie sees something moving by her fishing pole. He shouts and points to it.

  “Perrine, your line!”

  He stands up suddenly when he sees the line go taut. His initial reflex, before the others have even realized, is to climb over the seat to grab the pole that is about to flip up and over; but then, once his hands have closed around the wood, he freezes. It’s not the weight of the creature on the other end of the hook that worries him, no, even if the line is stretched fit to snap. It’s something else, something weird.

  He can’t explain what it could be.

  But it’s pulling too hard and the pole has bent down to touch the water.

  He cries out.

  “That’s no fish on the hook!”

  “What?” Noah says, alarmed.

  Louie hands the pole to Perrine and hurries toward the oars.

  “It’s shaking too much! It’s not a fish!”

  “But what is it?”

  The older boy doesn’t answer. He plunges the oars in the water to move the boat away quickly, he doesn’t know why, it’s just a danger he can sense around them, underneath them, he screams at Perrine:

  “Let go of your pole! Let it go!”

  The little girl, leaning over the water to try and hold her pole straight, stands up now, astonished. Really? At the same time, emerging from the sea with
a gigantic thrust, with a burst of spray clear across the boat, comes an arm, fingers curved, an arm then an upper body, a head with its mouth open as if to roar, streaming, enormous, targeting Perrine for sure, until it falls back in the water a few inches from the terrified little girl.

  They scream, all three of them.

  “What is it?”

  “Get back, get back!” shouts Louie, pulling on the oars as hard as he can.

  “A monster, a monster!” Noah shrieks.

  No, it’s a man.

  “Come help me!” Louie shouts again.

  Who is after them.

  “Come on!”

  God, the man is swimming faster than the boat can move.

  “But where’d he come from?” says Perrine in a panic.

  Louie doesn’t answer, terrified. So the island wasn’t empty. There’s no other explanation—around them, the sea is as smooth as the day before; only the rippling and terrifying spray in their wake, the sound of those huge breaststrokes, brown skin beneath the water. He screams again, Help me!

  Perrine grabs the second oar. Louie hands his to Noah, bellows, Row, row! and hunts under the seat for the emergency oar. There’s one on every boat. There has to be.

  Not there.

  The other seat? With trembling hands and a pounding heart.

  He feels it under his fingers at the very moment when the swimmer hoists himself up to their height, grabbing the gunwale with such strength that the small craft heels violently; all three of them are thrown off balance, and the man too, who surely wanted to lean on the gunwale, a fraction of a second, just time enough for Louie to raise the oar and bring it down on him, the way he did with Ades, the image is there before him, with all his strength, smack on the head, yes, exactly the same, except for the piercing scream from Louie’s throat, Noooo! he doesn’t know why he shouted this time, fear, prayer, rage.

  And this time too the man tips into the sea. For an instant Louie vibrates with the victorious fear in his guts, the man will wave his arms with cries of rage and terror, he’ll sink, that’s it, just like Ades, exactly.

  No, he won’t.

  The difference is that when he flipped backwards, either instinctively or with an insane force of will, the swimmer grabbed the oar.

  Louie feels it, that he doesn’t have time to let go.

  The thought goes through him: he’s caught already.

  Off balance, he falls in the water. All he hears is Perrine’s scream and the sound of the water opening to him.

  He falls, almost into the arms of the stunned man, who is holding out a hand, an instinctive, animal reaction—grab hold of the kid not to drown. Louie spits out the water from his throat and nose, sees the blood on the man’s face, wants to call out, pulls away from the fingertips touching him as they cling to his T-shirt, a cry at last, to Perrine and Noah, petrified on the boat, Row! Row! And then the words stop, no more room, all he can see is the fingers like claws groping for him, moving through the sea, he slaps his hands, kicks his feet, the man is after him, grazing him every time, Louie dodges, panicking. His gestures are becoming disjointed, from fear, from a lack of breath, from those arms too near, obsessing him, they’re all he can see, those arms and the spray of the sea where they’re struggling, the man will catch him, he will, Louie has no more strength. So he thinks of Pata who used to send him after the wild ducks when they went hunting, Pata who didn’t want to get another dog when his spaniel died, he said it hurts too much when they leave you, so it was Louie who ran through the swamps and swam out to get the birds, it was a game they played, Pata shooting his rifle and Louie swimming out. Yes, Pata said Louie was the best dog he’d ever had, the fastest to sprint over there and slip into the water, lively and nervous, he always found the ducks, the best, the best.

  Swim!

  He dives underwater, deeper down, getting away from the man and his shouts as he tries to stay on the surface. He filled his lungs just before, now he has slipped into the sea, his arms close to his sides to be as smooth as a fish, his feet kicking the ocean, three seconds, five seconds, ten. No time, no courage to look behind him, until he surfaces with a hoarse intake of breath, Perrine and Noah are on their feet in the boat, and cry out when they see him.

  “Louie! Louie!”

  He just manages to grab the stern with a shout, Row! Perrine and Noah sit back down at once, grab the oars and try, pull, they’re moving, yes, not fast, but enough for the exhausted man to give up on them. With a huge effort Louie presses his elbows then his arms over the transom, for support, he leans on it, kicks his feet as if he could make the boat go faster, as if he could push it, hard, he doesn’t want the others to stop rowing and he nods at them, Keep going, he constantly looks behind him, oh this horrible sensation that the man is grabbing his feet underwater to drag him down into the depths, but he isn’t, he’s floating, over there, half alive half dead, thirty feet away now, then sixty, Go on, says Louie again.

  On the island, several figures have appeared, waving and screaming.

  “Who is it?” cries Perrine. “What do they want?”

  Louie answers in one breath.

  “Our boat. Our supplies.”

  “But why?”

  “Because they haven’t got anything left, either. Maybe they want to go to the high ground.”

  “But who was he?” She points to the man’s head still floating above the water: two adolescents are now swimming toward him from the shore.

  “I don’t know. Their father? Keep rowing, don’t look. We have to get out of here, so they don’t try to catch us.”

  “We’re too far now.”

  “Not far enough. Not yet.”

  And he lets the sea carry him, gazing toward the island behind them, at the man who wanted to take everything from them.

  “Do you think he would have killed us?” asks Noah.

  Louie doesn’t know. The only image he has at the moment is that of the man rising up out of the sea like a monster, a shark, a beast, his arms pressing down on the boat as if to capsize it, oh yes, he was afraid, that the force would take them to the depths of the water, enfold them, suffocate them. Louie’s hands squeezing the boat, he trembles just to think of it, he still doesn’t understand. Those people laid a trap, they were concealed on the island already last night, of course they’d noticed the boat, they were waiting for first light to take it, and maybe they would have thrown the three of them into the water, Louie, Perrine, and Noah, to let them drown, if they wanted everything, yes, for sure they would have; and right now the three of them would be floating on the surface of the sea, their bellies swollen. Louie shakes his head, the tears stream down his cheeks, salt like the ocean. They won’t stop anywhere again, he swears. Ever.

  Only after a quarter of an hour has passed does he let the little ones help him back onto the boat. And even then, removing his soaked T-shirt and shorts to let them dry in the sun, he doesn’t take his eyes off the island, of course he can no longer make out the figures of the inhabitants, but he can still feel his hair standing on end, he looks at the sea, a few gentle ripples, what if that were another man. He pushes Noah out of the way, takes the oars, and, as if he had the devil at his heels, rows hard toward what he hopes is the east.

  And truly he does hope it is, for the sky has turned grayer, the weather seems stormy, he can sense it, and he doesn’t know where to go, he looks for the place where the light pierces through the clouds, without being sure that the angle he’s trying to follow is the right one, but at least they’re getting away from the island, after that there is only guesswork, only pretending, when the little ones ask him, if he believes in it hard enough, it will be the right direction.

  They had been expecting it. Louie had told them as much. But until the last minute they prayed the storm would pass them by, would turn back, into their thoughts they drummed the conviction that fate wouldn’t d
o this to them on top of everything else, not after it had almost served them up to a family even more wretched than they were, not after the fright, fate owed them this much, a moment of respite. Well, no.

  And yet, when the waves began to form, Noah still thought the storm might trail away any moment now, a false alarm, just bluffing, and he waved his arms as if to shoo it away, spread his arms into the wind to stop it, shouting, Go away!

  “Idiot,” said Louie.

  And Noah seemed to shrink, right then and there.

  He sat down next to Perrine, clutching the seat, and rolled his eyes, looking out at the surface of the ocean, spotted with whitecaps and spray.

  Silence.

  They watch.

  Try not to notice the gusts of wind mussing their hair and splashing them with spray. They turn their heads every which way, as if an island might appear by magic, they’d force Louie to land, in the end the storm is far more terrifying than the crazed inhabitants of islands.

  On the floorboards the hens have begun squawking, coming and going in a confused parade. The children know that the birds, too, can tell bad weather is on its way. They check the ropes along the boat, they’ll need to cling to them if it starts pitching too violently. They watch one another, trying to come up with what to say, what to think.

  Noah thinks of the sunken worlds underwater.

  Perrine thinks of Madie.

  Louie wonders if the hens will slide into the water, or if they’ll manage to hold on. He decides to spread a tarp across the boat and ties it with string. Noah raises his hand and smiles:

  “It’s like an umbrella. It will protect us from the rain.”

  “I hope the wind won’t rip it off.”

  And the impression they get is a very odd one when the storm suddenly wraps itself around them and sets the boat to dancing, because they can’t see anything, they’re trapped beneath the plastic, but there are just moments when the lightning illuminates the sea—at those moments, it’s almost as if the tarp had blown away. And yet a second later it’s there again, they can sense it in front of their eyes, they can feel it over their heads. Perrine is frightened: what if they sink. What if they get their legs and arms all twisted in the tarp and can’t get free, imprisoned like worms in cocoons that are too tight, drowning without a chance, without a gesture, chrysalises sinking to the bottom of the sea glinting blond and blue.