by Tom Anderson
The troop was returning.
And I was right in their path.
There was no option besides stay put, and find out once and for all if they could see me – or if they would react. It was going to be useless to run to the side in either direction. I’d just look like I was doing something wrong. Plus, the way they always walked, looking way ahead, meant they must have seen me already. Those empty white eyes had to have better vision than mine in the dark. I’d made them out, so they must have made me out, for sure.
The rhythm was draining out of my mind again. Breath was about to come in gasps. The hot feeling in my head wanted to rise and drag me down.
And then it all went. It all kind of, dispersed. As if my mind suddenly knew what to do, I stepped sideways, two clear strides, and put my hands in my hood pockets. Mum and Dad’s house key was there in my fingers, a little token from the real world back behind those dunes, anytime I wanted to return. Then I felt the doubloon in the back pocket of my jeans, rubbing my thumb against it, feeling the temperature and texture.
Like before, it was a different figure leading them down the beach.
They started passing me by, so close I could have touched them, and now I began to hear the sounds they made. Each one was the same: heavy breath firing out of their nostrils with every step of the left foot; lightly breathing in whenever they put forward the right. The careful regulation of breath, to each pace, was what was causing them to pause slightly every time they put a foot freshly on the ground in front. It wasn’t enough of a pause to stop them moving, but it gave their progress this stunted look as they stooped onwards towards the ocean behind me.
I started noticing the crunching, squelching noise their feet were making, too. Sand and saltwater, mixing around inside those shoes that looked like slippers made of super-worn, floppy leather. They had sand in their hair, and in their ears, sand spread finely along the velvety material of their jackets, sand everywhere.
It wasn’t until the nineteenth man – the one who’d led them up into the dunes in the first place – came back that I decided to try and make eye contact. And it was him I chose because he was the one who’d beckoned to me last time.
Again, he appeared out of the grey dunes about a minute late on this return leg. All of the others were well into the water by the time he reached me. I shuffled slowly sideways the other way, back closer towards the worn path of footprints in the silvery, wet sand. Closer to his way than I had been to any of the others, I waited for a reaction – and as he approached he slowed.
By the time he reached me he had almost stopped. But he didn’t. He stepped past without catching my eye at all – except he did it all with several seconds of stillness between each two strides.
Step.
Step.
Stop.
Pause.
Step.
Step.
Stop.
Pause.
I had to do something. If the chance would ever exist, this would be it.
So I started humming Bunny. ‘Dreamland’. The one I listened to earlier, and the other night. The one I always listened to when I really needed to be in control. The one that could lift me somewhere else more than any other track in the whole world. I just whistled the tune, but in my head the lyrics were rolling along, telling me about the land that was rumoured to be somewhere over the sea, where everything was perfect and nothing bad could get you.
The man had started beckoning, and his pace was picking back up, so I moved after him until the shoreline was in front of us and he stopped again.
As he turned to face me, a little surge in the surf bounced its way up the beach, and I could see the white foam ride up his heels, leaving a tiny trace of silt behind on his soaking socks. I watched the thin film of seawater carry on running along the sand, two metres from my toes, then one. My feet were going to get wet. Fifty centimetres, and the water was slowing down. Forty. Then thirty. Twenty. Still moving softly, now only a trickle.
I braced myself for the cold.
But when it touched me it wasn’t cold at all. Not in the slightest. No. The water was warm. And I mean warm like a bath.
The man up ahead was in just below his waist, now.
Water so warm you just wanted to sink into it and float or swim.
Or dive.
I was still whistling and the lyrics in my head were going through the glories and the heaven of Bunny’s dream land, while my legs were wading into this patch of gorgeous, cosy water somehow shivering with heat in the middle of the Chapel Shores night.
I realised then how they waded out into it so easily, without flinching. This little current was running deep, too. In beyond my waist, and still my feet were wriggling in the reassuring warmth of the water running along the bottom. This was like climbing into a hot tub, or a sauna – a really deep bath.
I wanted to see how far down it would go – the warm – and just before I reached the point where the water was up to my shoulders, couldn’t hold off anymore. I pushed my hands out above my head, cupped the palms together like some kind of prayer to the ocean and plunged forward. I popped my head up a few strokes further out, and the night air was immediately chilly and harsh. But under this sea, towards where the men had gone, it was only getting warmer.
I dived down again, swimming deep so my belly was brushing gently along the seabed. There were little currents of slightly warmer water mixed with wriggling streams that had a fresher feel. Then one current, even warmer again and more soothing than the rest, pushed me upwards towards where the surface should have been. I wondered how long it was before someone my size and age needed to breathe – but everything felt so comfy and the water was so good for my soul and the music in my ears was so loud that I just kept on swimming right where I was. I kicked my feet gently, first together, then in opposite motions. Then I let the beauty of it all take over. The warm currents would lead the way. I knew it without needing to be told.
The music was strong in my mind again. Yes, I thought, lead the way, alright – all the way – to the land across the sea.
Part 2
Chapter 12
Ah, the weight of water, when it presses down. And the noises too! Behind the ocean’s swirling, humming song grinding at the warm sand beneath me, I could hear something else. The darkness felt so safe. Push on, push on, I thought, feeling the softness of the water around. Kicking my feet, I felt the warm water shivering off the tips of my toes.
Now I was deep. And moving so fast. Ten, twenty, a hundred – who knows, maybe a thousand miles an hour. Nothing could hurt, nothing could get in the way. The whole ocean was moving with me, so warm, so heavy and so comforting.
The voice, though, was behind everything else. And the moment I heard it, that voice became the only important thing.
It came out of the deep, deep hum, but straightaway it was all around. Like whale-song, it could have been miles away or just behind me, beneath me, on top of me or even in me and running through me. It came, again and again. A voice, muffled by saltwater and bubbles. And it kept repeating itself – over and over. I could tell it was saying the same thing because the rhythm was the same. Each time, the same six or seven words.
Luca! My name! That was the last word. The only one I could make out.
Its tone, soothing but certain, I wasn’t worried at all about whether I could understand. If it just kept repeating the words, sooner or later they’d make their way into my mind.
Rising and dipping, the voice grew louder then softer, vibrations shaking the water. That voice, wherever and whoever, it was after me – and ahead of me. It wanted me, and nothing coming from that warm, soothing depth of salt water could possibly be bad. I knew it, as sure as I could ever be of anything.
‘I’m coming,’ I tried to say, thorough the weight of water. It was out there, just beyond but I knew I could get to it.
&
nbsp; The same murmur, stronger, louder, nearer. The same last word:
‘Luca!’
A bright light flashed, almost too quick to notice, but so intense and so sudden that it was impossible to forget. The warm began to lift, the current pulling away from the bottom. The thinning water started cutting away and, as the brightness filled in, slowly this time, the sounds sunk to the background.
‘Luca,’ I head it say again, and then at the last moment, one other word, easy to make out, in a sure, growling tone. ‘Come!’
* * *
I opened my eyes when I’d felt the water getting shallower and saw the outline of the city from just beneath the surface. Its colours had lit up even from beneath the sea as they wavered and trembled before my underwater vision.
Where I broke the surface, it was at the edge of a waterway between the two halves of the city. As I waded ashore, the new buildings were to my right, and the old ones straight ahead. The skyscrapers were a mile off – maybe even more – but even from there they imposed themselves across the hot and hazy air.
It took my clothes about five minutes to dry in that sun. Plus, it was so hot I didn’t even mind it when they were wet.
Behind the dirty city wall, a giant, yellow dome rose tall from the other buildings. It had bright trims of white running around it, and a small turret off its top. Orange and red shone out of anything that wasn’t yellow or grey. The wall ran neatly in front of the coloured buildings. I was walking towards it from the patch of deserted sand and shoreline out of which I’d swam.
I was heading towards the wall, though. You could see ramparts all along it, and its moist, dark colours made the whole thing look ancient straight away. The old city. You knew it, too, because the buildings were all of them rounded and pillared, painted and unique. There was an entrance through the great wall, with a tower or gate-building just over it. All along the approach I could hear the sound of reggae, in either Spanish or French, holding my familiar beat, calm and relaxed in the heavy, hot air. Then, at the gate, the music faded, and another beat started to creep up on me.
Boom-b-b-boomboom. Boom-b-b-boomboom. It was faster and shook the ground around it. It was asking me to accept it.
I walked through, into a clean square of bright churches and there were those strange iron statues of animals that didn’t seem quite to exist – a giraffe with the head of a shark, birds with arms instead of wings and a jaguar whose smile had in its corner a giant, wooden cigar.
There was some sort of parade going on inside this, the fort part of the city, too. Girls with glitter masks in bright purple dresses were dancing to this new drum beat. I tried to guess their age. Bit older than me… maybe… It was massive too, the parade – and everyone and everything was in Spanish. Drums were hitting this music again, which sounded like it should be reggae, but it had this kind of aggro energy to it.
Behind the girls came a marching band, younger – like twelve years old, apart from their leader who was also about my age – and then a little cart playing some sort of electronic drum-n-bass-type noise, driven by a middle-aged man. It was the two of these tunes together – the marchers with their brass and the portable DJ – that made this new sound, the sound that was pulling me onwards. The rest of the column of people behind, families, teens, older people, was walking, same pace as the band, further in, away from the outer wall.
I was fully dry now, and my hoodie was starting to be a nuisance. It had to be something like thirty five degrees here – way hotter than you’d ever get in Chapel Shores – and everyone else was just wearing T-shirts. Some weren’t even wearing that, and they had super dark skin that had been in the sun and the outdoors forever. I pulled the hoodie off, and could smell the drying seawater from my journey as it came up over my head. Then I flung it, along with the two extra T-shirts I’d put on, to the side of the road, and pushed into the crowd.
The tower and turrets of the churches and other buildings got taller and brighter in colour as we headed further in. Any buildings that were flat or square would have these wooden shutters and white balconies with hanging baskets of flowers and flags striped with the colours of no country I knew.
At the centre, right up ahead was yet another big, familiar plaza, but just as it looked like we were going to go right through it, the procession changed direction and headed left – away again and out towards the parts of town where I reckoned you’d find the fort wall. That was when the sudden urge to check where I was hit me and I found myself breaking away from the crowd. Wandering down a shady alley, I was immediately alone but with my head still running smoothly to the fading beat of the mystery music.
Another, smaller square, darker and empty, lay at the end of the alley.
Well… empty except for two statues.
The first was a shining, metallic impression of an enormous lady lying naked and on her side. I knew this piece! It was in Rogoff’s file. I tried to remember the name of the woman in the sculpture, but it was just beyond me. She was smiling a cartoon smile, as folds of fat sagged towards the edge of the white-brick block she had been placed on. I wanted to try and decipher the inscription, but my eyes were too quickly taken off her and drawn to the other statue in the square.
This one, I didn’t know.
It was charcoal black and, unlike the lady, exactly life-sized. It had been erected on a crude, wooden block about three feet high. The statue was of a boy – maybe my age, maybe younger, it was hard to tell. He had a metal ball and chain attached to his left foot, and another broken chain around his neck, made of iron or some other metal. The statue was so dark you couldn’t quite tell what the main bit was made of.
The boy’s expression was the most intriguing bit, though. He looked like a real child who’d been turned to stone just a moment before he started crying, and yet behind the drooping mouth and closed eye-lids there seemed to be some gesture of hope. I couldn’t say where it came from, but looking at him made you feel it.
And then there was the sign below. Someone had written in fresh marker pen, on the wooden block under the statue’s feet. A crudely drawn arrow pointed to a small hole in the box, and next to that was scrawled in English:
xxx~~~PLEASE GIVE A PESO FOR THOSE WHO LOST EVERYTHING TO THE SPANISH~~~xxx~~~EVEN MORE TO THE AMERICANS~~~xxx~~~AND WHAT WAS LEFT TO OUR OWN PEOPLE~~~xxx
It was written twice. On the floor, just to the side, the same message was on a creased piece of card, which had fallen flat but face-up so that it could still be read. I looked around in all directions. Who would put this kind of thing in the middle of a square that no one used? Also, how could you lose everything, then even more and then after that still be able to lose what was left?
I looked back up at the statue, raised like he was, several feet above me. Ah well, new land, I thought and went to walk away. But then he winked.
I mean it. He winked. Winked, as in his eye, which I could now see was wet and had the pink edges of an eyelid all around it, fully scrunched into a wink and then opened again.
Looking down at his sign again, I had another go at working it out. Okay, Spanish, then Americans… what was left… made sort of sense, if you tried. Plus the three x’s on the end, in the middle, at the beginning. A kiss?
‘I have to write them in English, my signs,’ said the statue. ‘Because… this is the only language the people who come here understand. Sometimes French, but I can’t write in French. Can you?’
‘Uh, I … I’m doing it for GCSE,’ I said, finally. ‘But your sign is kind of…’
‘I’ss a translation, Luca,’ he said, his accent stopping him from being able to say either of the ‘n’s. ‘My father, he help me.’
‘Did you just say my name?’
‘Yes. You’re Luca, no? I knew you would come here sometime today.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Look, I stay here more half an hour and th
en I can explain to you many important things. You like to wait? I’ss hot, my friend. Maybe move to dark first.’ He pointed to the shade a few steps away.
‘What about you?’ I said.
‘I’m used to the sun,’ said the statue. ‘I’ss no problem for me. Also my name is Alejo. You can call me Alex.’
Then he winked at me again, and straightened to look ahead. His eyes were once again the only hint of being human.
I walked slowly over to the steps he’d pointed out, and sat down. The stone floor was warm under me, even though this was completely in the shade. The air around felt thick and soft – a hot day, but comfortable once you were out of the sun. Resting my elbows on the steps behind, I leaned back and looked at the sky above. That kind of blue never happened where I lived. It was full, rich and deep. I remembered Gaby telling me once that the sky got its colour from all the water that hovered in it. That was why sunsets went all red and orange. The sun was shining through the water at a different angle. She reckoned the blue of a sky was something you could never paint properly, even if you mixed the shades up perfectly. ‘Never got the life when it’s only paints,’ she said.
The noises of the parade had faded right into the distance and all I could hear was the cooing of pigeons. There was a flock of them on the edge of the building’s shadow, walking in and out of the direct sunlight. The half hour drifted by and Alex stepped down from the wooden box. He walked straight over, dragging it behind him. When I jumped up to give him a hand he gestured for me not to. Once the box was into the shade too, he let go of it and, after gently shooing the pigeons away with his foot, walked over and sat down.
‘So… Bienvenido,’ he said. ‘You know where we are, Luca?’
