Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  Chapter 8

  Sophie

  1

  It was the birds that told Bobby about the dead man.

  Lachlan had put him to work on the most menial of maintenance chores first, since nobody knew what he could do, which involved cleaning off the worst of the caked seagull shit from the Top and the bamboo guttering, and collecting it all in wooden boxes which Marjorie optimistically called her ‘kitchen garden’ – optimistic in the sense that nothing apparently had ever grown in it. Over the years she’d tried collecting seeds from their food scraps and sowing them in what should have been one of nature’s best organic fertilisers, but something – either the salt in the air or the quality of the water – conspired against her, and though wiry sandgrass sprouted stubbornly on Stray’s higher reaches, no touch of green ever rewarded her efforts. Still, she was philosophical about it. ‘The Lord will provide when he chooses to provide’, she would say, but it seemed to Bobby that so far all the Lord had chosen to provide was other people’s crap for them to live off.

  While he was up there he avoided looking at the view too much, but he couldn’t help keeping an eye on the southern horizon; low down, a hazy line of cloud had appeared, which Lachlan predicted would bring rain sometime in the next few days. Also, a knot of seagulls were diving and fighting over something several miles out. It reminded him of the way they’d squabbled over his raw fish breakfast, and he wondered if maybe it wasn’t another raft, bearing another castaway.

  He hurried back down to raise the alarm.

  It did indeed turn out to be a raft – of much the same dimensions as his own – but its passenger had been nowhere near as lucky as Bobby.

  What was left was so badly decomposed and damaged by the scavenging birds that the only way they could tell it had been a man was from the tufts of beard on its hollow cheeks. A few pathetic remnants testified to the desperate soul’s last days: a plastic bottle half-full of urine and some scratches in the wood which might have been an attempt to keep track of the time or write a final message.

  The Strays broke up his raft for firewood and tipped him into the sea with a prayer for his soul – and even though Bobby didn’t join in, the knowledge of how close he had come to ending up like that made him want to be grateful to someone or something, so he made sure that he did a bloody good job on that guttering.

  2

  When Bobby managed to find any spare time, he bored a hole through the good-luck pearl which Joe had given him and threaded it on a piece of string around his neck so that it wouldn’t get lost, and then he busied himself carving a toy for the child out of a piece of driftwood. He felt sorry that the lad had no friends his own age to play with, and try as he might couldn’t get his head around why, if there were inhabited islands within reach, his parents kept him isolated out here. It seemed totally unnecessary – more than that, it seemed cruel. The boy deserved things like friends and girls to chase and an education. Not pearl diving and gutting fish.

  The toy was a swimming man with rotating arms on an axle through the shoulders wound up with a rubber band, so that when it was let go it splish-splish-splished along on its own. Joe was speechless with delight when Bobby presented it to him.

  It was one suppertime, and only because of the firelight, that Bobby noticed the oddness of Joe’s eyes. During the day, he wore the same kind of wide-brimmed sunhat as everyone else, which kept his face in shadow, but that evening the boy reached past him to a second helping of fish stew, and Bobby caught a strange, iridescent glimmer in the sclera of his eyes. What should have been the ‘whites’, except that they weren’t really white at all. They looked more like mother-of-pearl. He spent a lot of the next day sneaking covert glances at them, not wanting to cause embarrassment by drawing attention, and once he was looking for it in broad daylight it was unmistakeable. Outside the blue of his irises, Jophiel’s eyes were shot through with nacreous, rainbow swirls.

  He couldn’t not mention it to someone. Seb’s response was typically phlegmatic: ‘Sure, it’s weird, but so what?’ he said. ‘Maybe he eats the pearls. Who knows?’ Apparently this was one of Stray’s mysteries which wasn’t worth the trouble of pursuing, so he let it lie and concentrated on his chores and the more urgent problems of survival.

  He quickly recovered his strength and even put on a little muscle. The combination of fresh air, hard physical work and a spartan diet did more to undo his doughy pallor in one week than months in the gym had ever achieved. The others noticed, Allie especially.

  ‘Looks like our lifestyle is starting to agree with you,’ she said to him one day, and in passing let her hand trail appreciatively across the planes of his bare shoulders. No question about her coming on to him there, he thought. But how could it ever work in a place like this? He was set on getting away to those Islands as soon as possible, so he ignored it.

  Meanwhile, the clouds continued to build.

  3

  Two days later he was promoted to Assistant Kelp Harvester, with twelve-year-old Jophiel Lachlan as his mentor and boss. They worked from his raft and Joe’s little coracle out in the quadrant between the Up and Strange booms, using baskets of rocks to carry them down to the seabed thirty feet below, where great strands of kelp with stems the thickness of Bobby’s arm clung to rocky outcrops. Joe showed him how the baseball-sized flotation cysts – each with its reservoir of filtered seawater – grew at the base of each leaf and kept the plant growing towards the sun thanks to the desalinated water’s lower density, and how to cut them free from the stem.

  Bobby found the gloomy submarine forest utterly compelling. He wanted to be able to go off and explore its dark groves for hours. Joe showed him which kelp plants were being harvested and which were being left to regenerate, and warned him of his father’s injunction to never, under any circumstances, swim directly under Stray itself. The kelp there grew thicker than anywhere else, right up to the raft’s underside, and he could well believe that there were all kinds of lines and bits of netting which would entangle and drown a careless swimmer, without the need to make up stories about monsters living there. At the edges, fish in all manner of shapes and sizes darted amongst the waving fronds like birds and made their homes in the conical trunks of the kelp’s root holdfasts. They swam around him, entirely unafraid, as if inspecting his handiwork.

  But enjoyment bred complacency, and he got sloppy.

  The knife was so sharp that at first Bobby wasn’t even aware that he’d cut himself. There was a sudden blossoming of red around his left hand, and he had time to think That’s weird, it looks just like… before hot, stinging agony burst there too, made all the worse for being in salt water. His yelp of pain escaped in a stream of frantic bubbles, and he kicked for the surface.

  He clambered back onto his raft, smearing red everywhere, and yelled over to where Lachlan and Seb were working on one of the booms. While they were rowing over, Joe surfaced nearby.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he called, treading water.

  ‘Sliced my hand,’ Bobby grimaced. ‘Silly wanker.’ There was a long, deep gash across the fleshy pad at the base of his palm. And though he gripped it tightly blood dripped steadily from his clasped hands into the water.

  ‘Oh wow!’ Joe was peering down at it, fascinated. ‘Look at your blood! Look what it’s doing!’

  ‘I can see what it’s doing,’ Bobby muttered through clenched teeth. ‘It’s bloody leaking, that’s what it’s doing.’

  But that wasn’t what Joe meant.

  Where Bobby’s blood dripped into the water, instead of diffusing into a red cloud as it should have done, the drops remained round crimson beads falling slowly through the water like a broken string of ruby-red pearls. They were being gobbled up by three large fish who followed them to the surface, fighting over each new one as it fell.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bizarre.’

  Blood should definitely not do that. What was w
rong with him?

  They took him in, and Marjorie strapped him up with little sympathy since he’d effectively rendered himself a useless burden on them through his carelessness. He spent the rest of the day morosely trying to descale fish single-handed, watching the clouds massing with agonising slowness and wondering when it would rain, if ever.

  4

  That evening, when Marjorie took Sophie her supper, she came back to the fire with an oddly worried expression.

  ‘Bobby,’ she said, ‘it seems that Sophie wants to talk to you.’

  Silence fell over the meal. The Strays were looking at him expectantly.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say. I simply mentioned that you’d cut your hand, and she said she needed to see it for herself.’

  He looked at the blood-stained bandage and flexed his hand painfully. ‘She’s more than welcome to come out and have a good old point-and-laugh like everybody else, if she really wants.’

  ‘Best if you just go in and see her, son,’ suggested Lachlan.

  ‘Fine.’ He tossed his bowl down and stomped off grumpily to humour the crazy girl.

  Past the beaded curtain, he found that the hollow interior of the Hub was larger than he’d expected. Much of the space was filled with the beams and struts which held it up, but there was still enough room for him to stand up straight. In the open space at the very centre was a square hole in the floor, and barely a foot below that, water. The core of Stray was open to the ocean’s surface. It reflected the light of a single reed-wick lamp which burned next to where a young woman sat in a nest of bedclothes, staring at the reflections as if hypnotised.

  She was younger than he’d expected – for some reason ‘Sophie’ sounded like an old woman’s name – dressed in ragged jeans and a t-shirt of the same ubiquitous shade of sun-faded grey as everything else, but under a lank fringe of mousy blonde hair her eyes were deeply shadowed. He couldn’t decide whether she looked rapt with concentration or just exhausted.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ he said.

  She looked at him, and then down at his hand with small frown of concern. ‘You cut yourself,’ she replied simply.

  ‘I’m a silly bugger, I know.’

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘It’s not very pretty.’

  ‘Please. I have some experience with injuries. I’m what you might call the workplace’s designated first-aider.’

  He hesitated, plainly suspicious.

  ‘I’m sorry that we haven’t spoken much before now,’ she continued. ‘I sometimes find it hard with new people. It’s funny – we’re surrounded by all this emptiness, and yet somehow it feels so claustrophobic, you know?’

  ‘I know.’ He gestured around at the encompassing timbers. ‘Still, bit of an odd place to sleep for someone who doesn’t like enclosed spaces, isn’t it?’ He found himself relenting somewhat. She seemed to be genuinely sympathetic – or at least interested. Either way, he reasoned it was the best opportunity he had to find out more about her. He trusted his gut with first impressions much more than rumour and hearsay, and he wasn’t convinced of what the others had said about her.

  ‘Lachlan tells me you were the first one here. That you were on your own for a long time before anybody else arrived.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. There have been others here. Some left for the Islands. Others just sort of gave up. You have to be very strong to stick this place out for any length of time – but I suppose it suits Stuart’s sense of self-importance. That man has to be the alpha and omega of his own little floating family. You can’t blame him, though. This is a hard place to survive, and each of us finds their own way.’ She fixed him with an expression of surprising earnestness. ‘You should leave too. Soon. It’s not safe here.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he reassured her. ‘I intend to make my way back home as soon as I possibly can.’

  That seemed to please her, and she relaxed. ‘Good. So, are you going to let me look at that hand?’

  He crossed to her side of the pool, sat beside her, unwrapped the bandages and showed her his wound.

  ‘You going to tell me my future, too?’ he joked.

  ‘I could do,’ she murmured absently. Her hands were calloused and her nails chewed ragged, but she probed his wound with exquisite gentleness. ‘It seems clean enough. Salt water will hurt like a bitch, but it’ll do the trick. Do you know what haematomancy is?’

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘Divination by blood. I’m not going to do anything to you but this may seem a little… odd. Some people are so squeamish. Usually it’s the boys.’

  ‘What…’

  Where her fingertips had come away bloody, she put them in her mouth and sucked. He was about to tell her that he didn’t think that was a very good idea at all – there was no telling what kinds of bugs might be in his blood – when he saw the manacle encircling her wrist and the heavy chain which trailed from it and into the water.

  They had her chained. Crazy, Joe had said. Violent. Monsters under Stray. She had her eyes closed as she tasted his blood, as if concentrating hard. Or maybe just enjoying the taste.

  Slowly, like a man stepping off a landmine, he disengaged himself and edged away. She didn’t seem to have noticed. She was frowning slightly.

  ‘All here,’ she murmured. ‘You’re all here.’ She opened her eyes and looked at him, puzzled. ‘How can you be all here? That doesn’t make any sense.’

  But by that time he’d ducked back out through the doorway and into the fresh night air.

  5

  Bobby picked at the rest of his meal in silence, carefully avoiding eye contact with the others while he tried to make sense of what he’d just seen, and failing miserably. Sod waiting for the supply run. He’d leave it until everybody was asleep, load Allie’s fishing skiff with whatever was closest to hand and take his chances on finding the Tourmaline Archipelago. Starvation at sea now actually seemed preferable to spending another day with these lunatics. It was a shame about Allie, though.

  When he judged that he’d left it long enough to avoid drawing suspicion, he gave an exaggerated stretch and yawn. ‘Well, that’s me done, folks. I’m knackered. Going to turn in, I think.’

  As he turned to go, Lachlan said: ‘Bobby.’

  Bobby stopped. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just ask the question.’

  ‘Sorry? What? What question?’

  Lachlan sighed. ‘You know for someone who claims to have a consular background you’re about as subtle as a baboon’s arse – which is also what you’re currently making of yourself. Sophie has had one of her little chats with you, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Well then. Ask the question.’

  Bobby squared himself. ‘Alright then. What has she done to deserve being treated like an animal? Why have you got her locked up? What are you people doing to her?’

  ‘We haven’t. We aren’t. She does it of her own volition. She’s got the key on a piece of string around her neck – you can go and see for yourself, if you like.’

  ‘But why would anybody do something like that?’ he objected. ‘That’s crazy.’

  Seb threw his hands up in celebration. ‘Hallelujah! Finally! ’E gets it!’

  ‘Bobby,’ there was an earnest sincerity in Lachlan’s voice which he couldn’t deny. ‘I tried to tell you before: we’re not hiding anything from you. This place is too small for secrets. I’m not saying that each of us isn’t a basket case in our own way, but there’s nothing malicious going on here. We have to live with some very strange compromises in order to survive here, but we’re not bad people.’

  ‘But if that girl is sick, she needs help, surely. You have to get her to the Islands – she needs a hospital!’

  ‘There are no hospitals in the Archipelago,’ said Allie. ‘At least, no
ne you’d recognise as such. The islanders wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to cope with Sophie. Taking her there would only do more harm than good, and she wouldn’t want to go anyway.’

  ‘I hardly think she’s capable of making that decision for herself.’

  Allie stared hard at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Nice bit of holier-than-thou you’ve got going there, Bobby Jenkins. Tell you what, when you’ve got us all worked out, and you know what’s the best for everybody, why don’t you go and stick it right up your ass. In the meantime,’ she added, with a bright fuck-you smile, ‘Good luck with not dying, okay?’ And she stormed out.

  ‘Allie, wait…’

  But she’d gone.

  ‘We are caring for Sophie the best way we can,’ explained Marjorie. ‘We feed her, keep her clean, and try to stop her from hurting herself or others. We tried to take the chain off her once, but the poor child became so very distressed. It was awful. Her head’s full of paranoid delusions about things underneath the raft that only she can deal with. She’s just a girl, and she’s suffered so much; we’re the closest thing she has to a family.’

  Bobby sat back down, shamefaced and feeling stupid. ‘I think I owe you all an apology.’

  ‘Not necessary,’ said Lachlan. ‘I know how this must look to an outsider’s eyes. You might want to try that apology on Alison, though. She and Sophie – I don’t know; they have some sort of understanding.’

  ‘Come!’ Seb clapped an arm around Bobby’s shoulders and hauled him to his feet again. ‘We will unruffle her feathers with great quantities of the finest Ouzo, and your baboon’s ass will be all hers.’

  6

  A single crimson pearl of Bobby’s blood, having escaped the fishes’ voracious attention, drifted to the ocean bottom close to the wild thicket of uncultivated kelp which grew right up to the underside of Stray – where Stuart Lachlan had with good reason told his son never to swim, ever, under any circumstances.

  Something thin and black and whiplike uncoiled slowly from within the shadowed holdfasts – something which might have looked like the tentacle of an octopus, if instead of suckers it had possessed rows of lamprey-like teeth. It was only one of many which drifted, vegetative and blind, amongst the kelp, swaying in the currents around Stray. Its tip grazed the blood-pearl and drifted past.