The League of Sharks

by David Logan

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked. She looked at the vacant bed. ‘Where are the children?’

  *

  On the cliff-top, Junk was running as hard as he could. He was frozen to the bone but ignored the pain coursing through him. He ran after the giant whose long legs were carrying Ambeline away at twice the speed Junk could go. Ambeline was screaming. She could see Junk behind her in the distance.

  ‘JUNK! NO! I WANT MUMMY!’ she cried.

  *

  At the house, Janice and Dominic came out of the front door. Their daughter’s terrified screams were carried to them on the wind.

  ‘JUNK! STOP!’ Dominic ran as fast as he could; Janice too, trying to keep up.

  *

  The giant, hairless, silver-skinned man reached the edge of the cliff and stopped. Ambeline was struggling in his arms, desperate to get away. The man looked back and saw Junk drawing closer. Junk stopped. He held out his hand.

  ‘Ambeline!’

  The little girl, her wet hair matted against her scalp, reached out to her big brother, her knight.

  ‘Junk! Help me!’

  Junk charged at the man. ‘Give her to me!’ he shouted. The man kicked at him, knocking him to the ground. He stood over him, one of his massive feet stomping down on Junk’s chest, pushing him into the mud and pinning him there.

  ‘Fatoocha mammacoola charla,’ he said, and grinned. Junk saw rows of small triangular teeth in his thin, wide mouth. And with that, the giant turned and started running.

  ‘NO!’ shouted Junk, but he was powerless. He watched as the man sailed out over the cliff-edge, still clutching Ambeline. She was screaming and reaching out for Junk. He scrambled after them in time to see Ambeline and her abductor enter the tumultuous waters thirty metres below. They disappeared below the surface. Junk watched but they didn’t come up again.

  ‘JUNK!’ He turned to see his father appearing out of the thick grey rain, his mother close behind. Junk pointed over the cliff.

  ‘He took her! He took her, Da! They went over!’

  Dominic Doyle looked down at the waves crashing against the rocks below and let out a horrendous roar of anguish. Janice Doyle caught up and Dominic had to hold her back from the edge.

  ‘Where is she?’ wailed Janice. ‘WHERE’S MY BABY?’ She followed her husband’s gaze down to the angry water below. Then, slowly, they both turned to look at Junk. ‘What have you done?’ said his mother.

  Junk started to shake his head. ‘What? No! There was a man. A giant. He took her.’ But the words might as well have been snatched by the wind. As long as he lived, Junk would never forget that moment. His mother looked at him, looked back over the cliff and then back at him, her eyes boring into him with hatred.

  Junk Doyle was twelve years old when his mother stopped loving him.

  2

  In the days that followed, Junk was interviewed and questioned by a succession of men and women in suits and uniforms. He could tell they all thought he had thrown Ambeline off the cliff. No one believed his story. Sure there were things that didn’t quite add up, the strange cuts on Junk’s cheek for one thing, but no one believed in the existence of a giant, silver, hairless child-snatcher. Clearly there was another explanation: maybe Ambeline’s tiny little fingernails, desperately trying to defend herself against him, he overheard one of them saying to his colleague.

  *

  He didn’t care about any of them or what they thought. There was only one person whose opinion mattered. His mother hadn’t spoken to him apart from a few cursory, strained words here and there. She made sure they were never alone together. Every time she left a room as Junk entered, his stomach would twist itself round and round and he could feel the tears gurgling up in his throat, desperate to burst out in a burning wail of anguish. But he stopped himself. Choked them back. Swallowed them down. Into that black pit deep inside him. Sometimes the blackness would seep out and it would fill his body with emptiness. It was torture. Like he was drowning from the inside out, until that moment when he was completely empty or completely full, depending on your point of view. And then, he was nothing. Everything was blank. He was sure this was what death would be like.

  It never lasted long enough. Sound would be the first thing to invade the emptiness. The ticking of a clock. Rain against the windowpane. His father hammering in his workshop. Or his mother crying, the door to her bedroom closed and locked or, even if it was wide open, closed and locked to him.

  *

  His father blamed him just as much as anyone else did but forced himself not to show it. He tried to be normal with Junk. Not like nothing had happened, but he would hold him a lot. His big hands on Junk’s shoulders. Ruffling his son’s hair. Just like he always had. Except it was completely different, and Junk knew it. It was a pantomime. A show. He knew his father was just going through the motions. Mimicking actions he had done hundreds, thousands of times before. He loved him for doing it, but hated it every time he touched him. Every touch was agony. Junk smothered that pain too. ‘Com-part-mental-ized it,’ as one of the suits had said. Not to him, of course. Very few people said anything directly to him, apart from the endless questions that they didn’t want the real answers to.

  *

  Murroughtoohy was a small enough town that by the very next day absolutely everyone knew what had happened. Whatever friends Junk thought he had before didn’t call. He knew it was probably their parents rather than them, but as time passed he felt more and more alone. He didn’t know a single person on the face of the planet who didn’t think he was a murderer.

  *

  It all came to an end eleven days after Ambeline’s death. Christmas Day. Junk woke to the sound of his mother crying. This was no longer unusual. She was in a rage again, he could hear. She was breaking things. It didn’t seem to matter what any more. She would vent her fury on anything. A few days earlier he had seen her attack the Christmas tree. It was a bizarre sight. A grown woman wrestling on the ground with a massive tree covered in red and gold decorations. The tree fought back. Its needles scratched and cut her, as did the jagged edges of the shattered baubles, but she didn’t even seem to notice the blood. She ripped and pulled and kicked at that tree until its spine was broken and it was suffering in sap-stained agony, thinking, What did I do? I’m just a tree!

  Junk got out of bed and edged out on to the landing. The noise was louder out here. He could see lights on downstairs. The sounds were coming from the kitchen. He thought his mother was probably going twelve rounds with the turkey: knocking the stuffing out of it. Literally.

  As he descended the intricately carved staircase, built by his father, he glanced out of the window and saw lights on in the workshop in the back garden. He hesitated. His father was in there, not downstairs, not somewhere in the house, somewhere where he could help. Junk looked back up the stairs and knew he should turn round and go back to bed, even if he wasn’t going to be able to sleep. Whatever he did, he should not even contemplate going down to the kitchen. His mother didn’t want to see him, and it would only make things worse.

  Slowly he continued to descend. The commotion coming from the kitchen stopped as Junk reached the foot of the stairs and he wondered if his mother had heard him coming.

  The hallway was in darkness. The rectangle of light coming from the kitchen seemed somehow brighter than usual. Go back now, Junk said to himself in his head. Turn round. Go through that door and everything changes. He wanted so badly to stop and turn round and go back to his bedroom, but for some reason he didn’t. He drew closer and closer to the kitchen. Until he stepped through the doorway, into the light.

  *

  Everything was broken. Everything. Plates and cups and glasses and dishes were smashed. Cutlery was bent. The shade covering the fluorescent strip light had been bashed free, which was why the light seemed brighter than usual. All the cupboards had been wrenched from the walls. The tall, wide fridge-freezer had been tipped forward, snagging against the overhang opposite. The do
ors hung open and all the contents had rained out from within and collected in a large jammy, milky, chutney-y mishmash on the ground.

  Junk’s mother was sitting, head bowed, in the middle of the room. She was covered from head to toe in flour. It looked as if she had been baking and the bread had fought back. Rivulets of ketchup spread out around her. There was an unopened tin of peaches embedded in the partition wall leading to the utility room. A variety of cereals littered the floor: Weetabix oozed Marmite next to bran flakes peppered with pasta shapes.

  Junk stared. Taking in the devastation all around him. His mouth was dry. He stared at the top of his mother’s head. ‘Ma,’ he said in a small voice, unsure if he should speak at all but unable not to say something.

  Janice Doyle didn’t move for several long, awful moments. Then, slowly, infinitesimally slowly, she raised her head and for the first time in days she looked into her son’s eyes. He held her gaze, desperately hoping that she would reach out to him and be his mother again. Then, like film of a raindrop hitting a leaf in extreme slow motion, a tear, a single fat tear, grew in the corner of his mother’s eye. Junk couldn’t look anywhere else. He was fixated on that tear. He watched it grow and swell until it had no choice but to submit to the laws of nature and gravity and it fell. It slid down Janice Doyle’s cheek, cutting a path through the white of the flour until it reached her chin and fell to the ground. His mother’s lips parted ever so slightly. He could hardly hear her voice but it was deafening:

  ‘I wish you were dead.’

  Junk swallowed that, banished it to the black pit within, and then he turned and he walked away.

  *

  He went to his room and grabbed his hurling kitbag. It used to be his father’s and his grandfather’s before that. He hesitated. Maybe he didn’t deserve it now. Then he remembered he hadn’t done anything except try to save his sister. He grabbed clothes from drawers and stuffed them into the bag. He crouched by the skirting board in the corner and prised a section loose. Behind it he kept his precious things in a green metal lock box, including eighty-seven euros and change. He threw that in the bag too and hefted it on to his shoulder.

  He paused in the doorway and looked back one last time. He knew he’d never see this room again. Bitter tears streamed down his cheeks and he scraped them away with his sleeve.

  *

  He went back downstairs but avoided going anywhere near the kitchen. He turned back on himself at the foot of the stairs and lifted the latch on the pale green door that led into the boot room. He threw on his coat and his boots and left through the side entrance. Outside it was raining hard. He put up his hood and crossed a patch of sodden earth to his father’s workshop, where he stood on tiptoes so he could see inside.

  His father had his back to the window. It was warm in his workshop. Music was playing. Tom Waits. His father would always play that when he was feeling doleful. Junk saw that his father was working on a small ornate box of walnut with pearl inlay. This was going to be Ambeline’s Christmas present. A beautiful box for all the cheap pieces of tacky, crappy jewellery she collected from the front of magazines, like any girl her age. That was so like his father. Always had to finish what he had begun. Even though there was no point. Now the recipient of the box was gone. Junk knew that in a day or so that box would be in Ambeline’s bedroom, sitting on the shelves her father had made for her before she was born. Junk’s eyes were red, but the tears were lost to the rain now.

  Inside the workshop, Dominic heard or sensed something and turned to the window. But there was no one there. Junk had already left.

  *

  Junk walked east from Murroughtoohy until he reached the main road. He walked for three hours in the blackest of black nights. The rain was so hard he could feel every individual drop as they struck his face like a million pinpricks. He came across an articulated lorry parked up at the side of the road. He climbed up to take a peek through a slit in the cab’s interior curtains and saw the driver asleep in a cot inside.

  Junk found a shallow nook at the front of the trailer behind the cab. It was just deep enough for him to shelter inside and get out of the rain. He pulled his sodden coat around himself and fell asleep.

  *

  He was woken a few hours later as the lorry’s engine roared to life with a shudder. Junk was numb with cold but his little nook gave him some protection from the elements as the lorry pulled away, the driver oblivious to his stowaway.

  *

  The lorry drove to Galway, to the docks there, arriving just before first light. Junk pulled back deeper into the recesses of his little nook as a small, doughy man wearing a high-vis tabard and carrying an official-looking clipboard in an officious sort of way approached the driver. The man sported a comb-over that twirled and danced in the early-morning breeze and would not stay in place no matter how many times he patted it down.

  The wind carried the voices of the two men away from Junk so he couldn’t really hear what was being said apart from the occasional word. One thing he did hear was that the lorry was bound for somewhere called ‘Kroona’. He didn’t know where that was, but it sounded as good a place as any.

  3

  Kroona turned out to be A Coruña in northern Spain. Junk managed to stow away successfully. Many illegal immigrants try to sneak into Ireland. Very few people try to smuggle themselves out.

  Even though he had left Murroughtoohy without any sort of plan other than to get far, far away, on the journey across the Channel an idea started to form in his mind. He would find him. He would find the giant who took his sister and he would bring him home to Murroughtoohy, dead or alive, and he would lay him down in front of his mother and say:

  ‘This is who killed Ambeline. You see – I was telling the truth.’

  When he reached Spain and got off the boat, he realized he didn’t have the first idea how to find the man, but how many hairless silver tattooed giants with massive scars across their faces could there be in the world? He found an Internet cafe and stared at a search page for several minutes, trying to work out how to start. He typed in ‘scars’ and got some interesting results. Interesting as in sick and demented. The woman at the next terminal glanced at his screen, glanced at him and then quickly moved away. After searching for scars, giants and hairlessness, he spent the best part of two hours looking for references to the tattoo. He found nothing helpful and in the end decided that he wouldn’t find the answers via a keyboard, in a book or by staying in one place. He figured the answers were out there somewhere in the world and he would have to go to them.

  He decided that the tattoo of the shark fin and five stars suggested some connection to the sea, so that was where he would concentrate his search. He went to the harbour and hung around, trying to make friends with the local fishermen. This wasn’t easy, seeing as he spoke absolutely no Spanish. But gradually he picked up a few words here and there and there were enough Spaniards about who spoke English.

  His eighty-seven euros and change lasted long enough for him to start picking up some casual work. Usually cleaning out the boats after their return from sea. It was dirty, stinking work that paid little, but Junk was a hard worker and that was a virtue that was appreciated here.

  To begin with his lack of age raised a few eyebrows and the odd direct question, but Junk sidestepped the realm of direct answers as much as he could. When he came across someone who was too interested in why he was there and seemingly parentless, he would just move somewhere else.

  He moved from one port to another and worked every sort of boat going. Over the next three years he travelled the globe, working on fishing boats, trawlers, dredgers, ferries, cruise ships and tugs. In that time Junk grew taller, broader and stronger, looking more like his father every day. By the time he was fifteen, Junk could pass for eighteen without raising a single questioning eyebrow. His skin had become darker from working in the elements. Day after day of intense sunlight burning down on him and the continual spray of seawater had roughened his skin,
aging him. His verdant green eyes stood out even more because of his tanned face. He was an intense and serious-looking young man though still crowned by an explosion of wild black hair, which was forever flopping over his eyes.

  He had been all around the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, and spent most of a year in South America. Now he spoke eight languages, not one of them fluently, not even English any more. Sometimes he would go for months without talking to another English speaker, but he would get by in pidgin French or strangled Russian or a smattering of Arabic. Somehow the multinational seafarers could always find some common ground when it came to language.

  *

  For a long time, he found no trace of the scarred giant. No one he met had heard of such a man or recognized the tattoo that Junk would reproduce quickly and expertly on a napkin or the back of a menu or beer mat when the moment called for it. Then one night in Valparaíso, Chile, in a rundown waterfront bar, he met a grizzled sea dog by the name of Salvador de Valdivia, who took a shine to Junk when he discovered he was Irish and swore blind that he himself was descended from Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme, Irish–Chilean hero of the nineteenth-century Chilean War of Independence. Salvador was an old drunk with his best seafaring years far behind him, but he and Junk got talking nonetheless. Salvador’s English wasn’t bad, but his attempts at mimicking Junk’s admittedly fading Irish accent made him sound Jamaican. He didn’t recognize the description of the giant and pointed out that it was unlikely he would ever forget such an individual, but when Junk drew the tattoo for him the old man gasped, muttered to himself in Spanish and started nodding excitedly. This he had seen.

  ‘Where?’ asked Junk, his heart pounding violently in his chest. Frustratingly the old man couldn’t remember immediately. He squeezed his rheumy eyes shut and tapped his rough sandpapery fingertips against his leathery, corrugated forehead as if he could jar the memory loose, and maybe he could because after a moment he sat up, arms raised triumphantly.