by Philip Webb
“That’s the way clothes should work,” she says, tucking it under her shirt.
And I smile, cos it’s like she’s well and truly got the hang of gravity now, but she don’t smile back. She just picks up her precious earmuffs and heads back to the fire.
I catch Peyto looking at me from behind all the bleating goats – bare to his waist, struggling to keep his balance. And in spite of everything, the sight of him tiptoeing about, hair standing on end, covered in bits of hay, makes me smile. And more than that – the way his arms and shoulders tense as he chivies the goats out of his way makes me steal glances for a while longer.
Irene gases on about nothing much. It seems to me she’s breezing on past the sheer strangeness of us racking up, though she does look happy for the company. She talks to Dad, mainly about folks he knew as a boy, but somehow she manages to steer clear of anything to do with the here and now.
Finally a silence falls over the black-house, and there ain’t no more small talk left in anyone, even Irene.
“You’re in some trouble, then?” she asks at last.
“We have to find passage to the north,” goes Dad. “To the Wilds.”
Irene shakes her head. “You won’t find no one willing to go farther north than Felixstowe.”
“Why not?” asks Peyto.
“Too dangerous, young man. Some used to head up to fishing grounds round the Wash, but you got raiders operate them waters now. Clean you out and cut your throat. No mercy on the sea. That’s why everyone goes in convoy now.”
Dad pulls out his money bag and places it in Irene’s lap.
She shakes her head. “It ain’t a question of money. If estuary people thought they could help you out, they’d do it for free, but no one’s gonna risk their boat chasing up north. Not without a good reason anyway.”
We all look at each other, unwilling to break the silence.
“I ain’t probing,” sighs Irene. “Your business is your business, but people round here ain’t gonna go out on a limb ‘less they know what’s at stake.”
Peyto speaks out then. “We don’t even have a way of repaying you for the kindness you’ve already shown us, but you are our only hope.”
Dad steps in. “That’s enough, lad. She’s said she can’t help us, plain and simple.”
“But Wilbur and the others …”
“We’ll make our own way to the north.”
“There’s no time!” Peyto cries. “They’ll be dead!”
“Who’s Wilbur?” murmurs Irene.
“My son, but –”
“Well, then, you should’ve said so in the first place. I have a boat, the Lodestar; she’s a pot hauler. Not the fastest – maybe ten knots top whack, and her winching gear don’t work, but her engine and hull are sound.”
Dad drops his head, powerless to argue back. “Let me at least give you what I have.”
“You’ll need that for supplies and fuel – I can help you get what you need from the chandlers downriver. My mind is set – that old boat’s been tied up too long anyhow.”
I’m so gobsmacked at her generosity that I just hug her.
“Goodness, child! Wait till you see the old tub first – you might not be so free with your love then!”
“Thank you,” goes Peyto. “This boat – I swear I’ll bring it back to you.”
“Oh, so serious, young man! No promises. Not when it comes to voyages on the sea. People come back by the grace of God, and if you do, all well and good.”
She bustles us all out of the black-house and down to the pier, chatting all the while about the boat and what kind of shape she’s in.
It has to be said, the Lodestar looks pretty rough-and-ready, but what do I know about boats? She’s about forty feet long – blotched with red paint and littered with junk. The wheelhouse has a cracked window and the winch on the back is fused together with rust. Still, Dad seems highly delighted. He inspects everything from the engine under the deck to the bunks beneath the wheelhouse. It ain’t long before we untie the moorings and chug the half mile or so to the chandlers. From there we load up with drums of fuel, tinned food, and a barrel of water. Irene stands out on the pier to see us off.
“Don’t dally now! I hate good-byes, ’specially long ones! The Lord’s speed and kind weathers to you.”
She gives us each a hug and, without another word, turns away, as if she’s expecting us to be gone no more than a day. I can hear her gabbling on to the chandler before we’ve even untied. And maybe that’s the best way to do good-byes.
Dad holds the wheel and sets a course for Allhallows. It’s a short journey, less than half an hour, and when we reach the headland, Maleeva’s waiting there for us, gazing out to sea, while all around her seagulls swoop and cry.
FRIEND OR FOE
That first stretch of the voyage, there’s a kind of lull in us all. We’ve spent so much time figuring and fretting and running that maybe we’re all just done in. Under the calm, though, it’s murder, cos I feel every freckle on the countdown cuff give a nip as it disappears. And as them time bands whittle away, I can’t even bear to look at them no more. Cos we can only go as fast as the engine will take us. Inside, I chivy the Lodestar along every climb and dip, almost dragging it along, chalking off the miles as we inch northward. The journey is dead time, but I tell myself I need it, to get strong, to get ready, for the last push.
Me and Peyto spend the first few hours dozing in the berths under the wheelhouse, feeling the chug of the engine and the sway of the waves. I wake up to find him watching me. I’m dribbling a bit, so I make a joke out of it but there’s a look about him that stirs me, so that the kidding about turns into a scrap of wills and we end up checking each other across the tiny space, locked in a kind of spell. Only the grim sound of retching snaps us both out of it.
It’s Erin. The tipping of the deck sends her guts up so bad she’s walloping over the side till there ain’t a morsel left inside her. She stays at the back of the Lodestar with her head in a bucket, jibbing away from the very sight of the ocean. Peyto tries comforting her, but she ain’t in the mood to speak and she shoos him away.
It’s funny how things kick off. I reckon it’s being on the boat that don’t help matters. Cos when you’re huddled on this lump of wood in the sea, your tempers and beefs ain’t got no place to go.
It starts with Peyto, though it ain’t his fault. I figure he’s just eager to know stuff about the boat, but I don’t know squat cos it’s the first time I been on a proper one. So he corners Dad instead, who’s only too happy to yabber on about how the engine works, and the winch, and fishing, and currents, and God knows what else. And after a lifetime of having Wilbur not taking an interest in anything that ain’t in a book, Dad warms to him.
At one point, I see Erin watching Peyto over the top of her bucket, and if looks could strike a tree in half … At last Dad goes to take over steering from Maleeva.
“Getting ready to colonize, Peyto?” goes Erin. And there’s an edge in her voice I ain’t heard before.
“Why not? We’re down here now, aren’t we?”
“I just wouldn’t want you to forget there’s forty-seven who aren’t down here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m going back to the ship to get the others – the same as you are.”
“It looks as though you’d rather stay here if you had the choice.”
He walks closer to where she’s huddled round her bucket. “Well, I don’t have the choice, Erin.”
“I just need to know you’ll do what you have to. When the time comes.”
“Take my place as a sleeper? Even though I might end up staying asleep for a million years?”
“Or forever,” I add.
“Stay out of this, Cass. We already know what you think,” goes Erin.
“There’s no other way to repair the ship,” mutters Peyto. “If I don’t do it, then who’ll take my place? Not that anyone’s bothered to realize I’m gambling my life to do it.”
<
br /> “I’d do it for you if it was your family.”
“It’s just that you didn’t even ask me. You just expect it.”
“The ship said we would have our time –”
“Halina said never to trust it!” I blurt out.
Erin slings her bucket across the deck and stands up. “Halina didn’t have the same problem!” she cries. “The Aeolus wasn’t three days from burning up when she decided to bail out!”
Peyto’s voice is quiet with fury. “She was trying to save us all when she fought the ship.”
Erin throws up her hands. “I know that, but things are different now. Whether you trust the Aeolus or not, we have to be sleepers. It’s our only chance for life.”
“Some chance,” I go. “If you lay down in your pods, that crazy ship ain’t never gonna wake you up! You’d be better off going up in flames – at least then you’d know what was happening!”
“Better to have certain death than a chance of life?” cries Erin. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you got all the answers, Erin!” The rage rises inside me. “It’s simple for you, innit? You ain’t exactly grasping hold of a life down here, cos your whole life’s in storage.”
She gapes at me, but her answer don’t come.
“Ain’t that right? But you ain’t so good at seeing everyone else’s choice, are you? What happens if the ship don’t trade Maleeva for Wilbur? Then I ain’t never gonna see him again, am I? And if he wakes up at the end of the world, he ain’t never gonna see me, or Dad! You never thought about that, did you?”
By now, Maleeva’s watching and Dad’s glancing over his shoulder at our raised voices.
“If you’d never showed up in the first place, Wilbur wouldn’t be stuck up there! We helped you cos you was desperate!” I’m so riled I can’t even look at no one no more. So I turn tail and head for the winch at the far end of the boat, which ain’t far enough.
I wedge myself between old lobster pots to shelter from the wind, and for ages I just stare at the sea. Slowly, slowly, I cool down. It’s crazy how we all got so much to lose now – different things. Erin ain’t to blame – if I was in her place, I’d feel the same. But still, I can’t even think about being split up from Wilbur. He’s a dippy spod, but I don’t know what I’d do without him. And it kills me to think that I can’t bring him back, with us, where he belongs. If only there was a way. But every angle I look at it, the Aeolus will crash if it don’t get repaired in time. And it ain’t gonna get repaired without forty-nine flinders. For every flinder, a sleeper. And if that happens, it’s game over. Cos I don’t trust the ship – I just know it won’t wake anyone up. It keeps coming round to the same problem. Sleeping’s the same as dying …
And then it smacks me between the eyes. I’m staring at the same patch of waves, but suddenly everything I’m looking at is different. My heart nearly clatters to a halt. Cos the idea that’s just sprung out of nowhere is so killer that it scares me that I’ve even come up with it. It’s desperate. A gamble that hangs on what the ship won’t do, what it can’t do, even if it wanted. It’s all or nothing. And that’s why it’s gonna work. I been looking at it the wrong way – we all have. It ain’t got nothing to do with repairing the ship, cos that won’t cut it. But what I need to figure out is the details – that’s where the devil is, as Gramps used to say. The spell of the sea draws me in then – I can’t tear myself away from it. The endless pitching of tips and troughs, one wave sliding into another, like a landscape of distant mountains changing in seconds. And as the hours slip by, I play out a battle in my head, over and over again. A battle of wills.
Me against the ship.
It’s bleak under the darkening sky. Peeping out under a line of cloud come the last red streaks of the setting sun, and all the shattered gold on the water. I think so hard about the plan that it seems real, like something I could see out there on the broken waves – a thing, like a blade I’ve polished and polished.
I’m dozing off when I hear footsteps approach. And even before I see him, I know it’s Peyto.
“Friend or foe?” I challenge.
“Friend.”
He wedges himself in beside me.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”
“I will.”
His body next to me is warm, wriggling for space, half fighting, half cozying, but tense, too, like he’s plain terrified. And it’s uncomfortable now with him squirming about in this nest I think of as my own. But I don’t want him gone.
“I never meant to say that,” I go. “About wishing you’d never turned up.”
“Yes, you did. It’s true – if we hadn’t come, then Wilbur would be safe now.”
“Maybe. Except without you being there at Big Ben, Wilbur would’ve fallen. I couldn’t’ve saved him.”
I don’t look at him. I can’t.
“We need each other maybe?” he says softly. “The scavs and the sleepers.”
We sit like that for a bit, listening to each other’s breathing. And there ain’t nothing else to say. Being like that is so strange, a game of dare and double-dare, bluff and push and nerve. And all the time, all the heat swims up to my face, and I try to batten it all down, or hide it away, or lose it in the dark. I want to reach out to him, but I stop myself – how many times? I lose count.
Thing is – I can’t see nothing now, unless it’s through the plan. And I done my sums all right. If we play it the ship’s way, chances are Peyto’s going on the same long sleep as Wilbur … In just a few days I’ll never see him again. And that makes me even more sure about what I’ve got to do. Except it’s never that easy, is it? Cos I can’t tell him. He’d argue against it. So it has to be my secret. Which hurts so bad that the only thing I can think of doing is kissing him.
The waves keep slopping about the same as ever – the dumb stuff of the world, looking on, not even taking any notice. I can feel absolutely everything – the cold, hard floor of the deck, my hair being ruffled about by the wind, the creak of the lobster pots. And just when I figure the moment’s gone … he takes my face in his hands and kisses me on the mouth. We’re lost – locked at the lips, feeling the shape of each other’s teeth and grabbing breaths. And kissing is so far from normal that we pull apart quickly. And that makes me laugh a bit, which sets him off, too. And after, we kiss each other again, but softer this time, to hide our faces and feelings, and to wonder at it alone. We lie there for ages, and all the world goes back to being the way it was – the wind is still there, and the waves, and the moon, the same as before. Except it ain’t.
My eyes droop, but I fight it cos I want to carry on feeling Peyto against me. But you can’t fight sleep when it comes. And I don’t dream. I just come to later in a dizzy flood of daylight.
The sea is rougher, sending up streamers of spray. And my heart jumps when I remember Peyto, except he ain’t here beside me no more.
LOGGERHEADS
I can’t tell Peyto, or Erin, or Dad about the plan. But I’ve got to tell Maleeva, cos I need her help if it’s gonna work.
As the hours drag by, I can see we’re heading closer to the coast. The land is flat and low mostly – home to the Ferals and Blue-faces, tribes I’ve only heard about in scav tales. I wait most of the afternoon till Maleeva is on her own, taking a turn at the wheel, and everyone else is taking a nap. She’s got her back to me, hunched over something that flares with light, as I step up to the back of the wheelhouse. And as I draw nearer, I twig that she’s speaking to someone. She’s holding what looks like a scroll of paper, except it’s a screen, and on it is the face of Commander Serov.
First up I’m ready to believe she’s sold us out. But then wouldn’t the troops be chasing us down by now? Serov snaps something out in Russian, and she ain’t so much angry as cut up.
“I will not,” goes Maleeva.
Serov looks stung. “Your own Russia not good for you now?”
“What is there for me in Moscow? What’s the
point of going back?”
Serov snorts. “You choose to stay here – this dead island?”
“It’s only dead because of war. Chasing for the artifact is what killed this place, its people.”
“You know nothing of the artifact.”
“I know what it did to the Okhotniks.”
Serov shakes her head and it’s weird to see her face soften, just for a moment. “You do not understand. This thing has many secrets, maybe a cure for you …”
“There is no cure, you know that.”
“You are angry at me, always angry.”
“I’m not. I couldn’t be angry if I tried now. I’m too tired of talking it over and over. You don’t listen. Just stop searching for us.”
“How can I do that?”
“It’s easy. Call off the hunt. Take your troops away from this island.”
“And then you come back to me?”
A shudder takes hold of Maleeva then. “This cage I’m in, did you ask me if I wanted to live inside it? Did you ask me? Ever?”
Serov’s face crumples – all that hard control suddenly gone. “I need you to be alive!”
“You need me? And so I must be alive?”
“Come back to me! Just tell me where you are!”
I come nearer. I know I should call out or make a noise, but I can’t help myself. I’m so close I can see the moment Serov gives up, when the words lock in her throat. Maleeva touches her fingers to her lips and passes the kiss onto her mother’s face. It’s final and Serov knows it, cos a gasp takes her, and then Maleeva carefully folds up the scroll from the edges in, till just the pale eyes are left, burning out of the paper, straining for a last glimpse.
I’m standing there, caught in the act, when Maleeva turns to me. She tosses the folded-up scroll through the side window, watching as the wind snatches it away.
