The Sea and the Sand

by Finn Óg

  “Corrupt,” corrected Habid.

  The doctor said nothing.

  “Why did he call you?”

  “Because I tend to the prisoners.” The doctor noted how easily the lie had come to him.

  “So why didn’t you take me to the hospital?”

  “You know why,” said the doctor, gathering rhythm.

  “If you help to cover-up torture, why would you ask me questions pretending you want to prevent it?” Habid rounded on his carer, keen as a fox.

  “Well, Habid,” shrugged the doctor. “You have me there.”

  “You are working for the police,” said Habid. “You are the next interrogator.”

  “I am the man with the water, Habid,” said the doctor, “and the morphine. That’s all you need to know.”

  “No, what you need to know is this, if you want a slice of my business, I want a deal. And I walk from here with insurance.”

  The doctor stared at Habid for a moment, then leaned in and whispered as he swabbed the rat’s mouth. “That police officer is a dog. He is my cousin. I detest him. I can help you, for a price.”

  Habid’s head jolted back as he focused on the doctor. He had no choice but to whisper back. “What do you want?”

  “I want passage to Europe. I want papers with medical qualifications. I want a new life, and I want money.”

  “You don’t want much,” scoffed Habid.

  “You don’t need much,” said the doctor with equal sarcasm, “except medication, fluids, antibiotics to treat the infection and protection from the next round of interrogation when you refuse to talk.”

  Habid considered. “I have infection?”

  “You will almost certainly lose a leg, perhaps a hand, and as for your family area …” the doctor looked towards Habid’s groin, “… it could fester. Very painful without drugs.”

  Habid’s neck prickled with panic.

  “Can you save the leg – the hand?” he asked, suddenly desperate.

  “It is possible.”

  “How do I know this isn’t just another means to get the information your cousin wants?”

  The doctor thought for a moment, staring at Habid, weighing up the risk of trusting an inherently untrustworthy human. “There is no gain without risk,” he muttered absently.

  “What?” asked Habid, lost.

  The doctor emerged from his distant musing. “My cousin must be removed as part of this arrangement.”

  It was Habid’s turn to weigh. He rested his head back, closed his eyes and wished he was at his lucid best. “You could have him removed if you wish, but to achieve what you want – what I want – we would be wise to leverage his influence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He can help us for a while. He can open doors, keep the police away from us. Until the time is correct.”

  “What doors?”

  “Do you know how difficult it is to get people from Libya to Egypt without getting detained?”

  “I’m looking at it,” said the doctor.

  Habid cracked a wry smile.

  “It can be done, doctor. I made a stupid mistake – I went to a hotel, that is all. But with the police turning to look the other way, we can do more. Move extra people.”

  “There is more to this,” said the doctor. “The risk is too great to cross borders.”

  “You are a clever man,” said Habid.

  “So what else is going on here?”

  “All in good time,” said Habid. “You show me you mean what you say and we will progress. Until then, small steps.”

  “So what is the first step?” asked the doctor, suddenly aware that the rat had managed to turn the table.

  “We need the boats.”

  The doctor was keen to reassert some authority, conscious he was rapidly losing relevance. “I will help you get your boats, but you must make sure I get what I want. A new life. In Europe.”

  “You are a doctor. You could probably go to Europe anyway with your skills.”

  “Ordinarily perhaps.”

  “Why do you need me?” Habid’s cynicism knew no limits, even in the midst of his misery. “What did you do?” he leered.

  “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

  “Bad choice, doctor – if you are still a doctor.”

  “I’m the man with the drugs.”

  “I’m the man with the ability to get you what you want. You see, doctor, we are dependent on each other. So, what happened?”

  The doctor exhaled and lamented the cunning intelligence and stubbornness of the rat.

  “I’ve been in the pay of my corrupt cousin for too long. I have, let’s say, a questionable clinical record.”

  “You got caught,” Habid asserted knowingly.

  “Just as you are. Now you and I can help one another get out of the net.”

  Habid thought about the fishermen he’d seen slaving for nothing on the beach, the wriggling of the few fish that had been caught and the one that had escaped as a clumsy Y-fronted man had fumbled it from the net. He wouldn’t give up. There was always an opportunity. “If we do not collect the next boat, the supply chain will halt.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the doctor, a little too eagerly.

  “If we do not collect, the supplier will assume we have been compromised and the arrangement will end. No second chances.”

  “So how do we collect the boat? From where?”

  Habid tried to shift a little, the pain coursing through him. “Sinai,” he said.

  “You go to Sinai to get these boats?”

  “Not any longer,” sneered Habid. “That’s up to you now or your evil little cousin. Now, what is your name?”

  “Doctor,” said the doctor. “You can call me doctor.”

  Sam almost ripped the chart as he tore it from under the lifting lid of the table and wrestled it open. He’d spent thirty minutes hugging Isla and apologising for being so cross. When she eventually spoke he realised he’d misunderstood the root of her upset. She’d been shocked by his anger, certainly, but eventually she explained it was more than that.

  “I don’t want her to go,” his daughter said.

  “Who?” said Sam, momentarily confused.

  “My new friend,” she said.

  Sam looked down at her big brown eyes swimming in sadness and realised how much he’d deprived her of: friends, normality, interaction, play. His heart sank.

  “Alright, darlin’,” he said, and hugged her again. “But eventually we’ll have to find somewhere safe to leave her ashore,” he said.

  “Why? Why can’t she stay with us?” Isla pleaded.

  “Because she has to live with her family and she’s from a different country and when we go to Ireland they won’t be allowed in.”

  “Why?” Isla asked again. “Why in Ireland won’t they let someone in?”

  “It’s complicated, darlin’. We need to leave her somewhere closer than Ireland,” Sam said, looking at the door to the forward cabin, grateful for the language barrier that prevented eavesdropping. “So they can get the food they like and apply for asylum.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Safety,” Sam said. “They must have been running away from something scary – like a war or something.”

  “Then we should look after her,” said Isla, firm in her understanding of the important elements of the conversation and oblivious to the bureaucracy.

  He might as well have been cradling his dead wife. “If we could, we would, Isla,” said Sam, and half meant it. There was something about the kid that Sam admired. A stoicism or a steadiness in the face of adversity. “But we wouldn’t be allowed to.”

  Isla remained silent but Sam knew he hadn’t heard the last of the argument. His determined little girl was simply gathering her thoughts and working it all out. She would challenge him again, as she always did, with a logic he found hard to fathom and difficult to counter.

  Tassels vibrated at the news, his excitement growing as the
route was recounted. His cousin leaned nonchalantly against the door frame and explained with surprising conviction what he and the rat had concocted as truth. Tassels span on the dusty floor making a sweeping noise as he shuffled around building his plan.

  “So if we get the boats, we can make the contact and create our own arrangement for the future.”

  “I suppose so,” said the doctor.

  “Good, very good,” Tassels muttered distractedly. “Now go and see to him. Keep the information coming. And send that fat fool in here.”

  The doctor opened the door and nodded his head back towards the office. “He wants to see you,” he said to Big Suit, who was perched on a precarious plastic chair, his head in his hands.

  “It’s about time you got up off your ass,” Tassels barked into the hallway.

  The large man lumbered weakly into the office and was coated feet to face with a disgusted look.

  “You need to get on the road.”

  Big Suit’s jaw muscles flexed, distorting his face.

  “Get your car, keep your phone on. I’ll let you know where as soon as we get the information from the Libyan.”

  Big Suit suspended his astonishment. He hadn’t expected an apology but an explanation would have been nice. In the past Tassels’ temper had often been followed by an arm-around-the-shoulder session, a rub of the back, assurances whispered of Big Suit’s importance, the regard in which he was held. Almost fatherlike.

  “I don’t understand,” was all he could manage.

  “Of course you don’t – you’re an idiot.”

  It was as if Tassels had a new group of friends to play with and his old friend was no longer as interesting. It grated even more that the new in-crowd consisted of a disgraced doctor and a desert rat. The gruesome urges Big Suit had been pushing away resurfaced immediately but he suppressed them in the knowledge that he wasn’t yet fit enough to finish this relationship to his liking.

  “Where am I going?”

  “East.”

  “Where east?” said Big Suit gasping.

  “To a port. I’ll let you know which one.”

  “Why?”

  “We need to collect the rat’s boats for the migrants. They must arrive by ship – there is no other way. If we are to take over his operation, we will need those boats. It will be a port – maybe Sharm.”

  “You want me to go into the Sinai?”

  “I don’t know yet, you fool, but I want you on the road and most of the ports are east. If plans change, I’ll call.”

  “My phone is broken.” Big Suit removed his handset from his pocket sheepishly, its screen crazed, battered and unreadable.

  “How did you do that?”

  Big Suit stared at the floor silent.

  “You dropped it, didn’t you? When you got too excited with the rat.”

  “I’ve never been to Sinai,” Big Suit then tried.

  “Well, here, take this.”

  Tassels tossed the little bag containing the seized GPS and the rat’s phone at Big Suit who fumbled and dropped it. He nearly lost consciousness as he stooped to lift it.

  “That phone may be useful in case the boat delivery person calls. Ring me, we’ll get the rat’s number.”

  Big Suit struggled upright, tadpoles swimming around the surface of his eyes.

  “But Sinai?”

  “Are you scared?” goaded Tassels.

  But Big Suit wasn’t scared. He was delighted.

  Sam stared at the chart and reached for the parallel ruler, glanced at the GPS and plotted the latitude and longitude coordinates across the paper to pinpoint their position. Then he cast around looking for the nearest land mass; they were almost equidistant from Cyprus and Greece. He didn’t want to go to Cyprus – Larnaca was where his special forces career had ended and he had no desire to return. Besides, it was east and he wanted to make west – Crete it was. He drew a line direct to Crete and as there was little tide to speak of he grabbed the dividers, placed the pins on the side of the chart to measure ten nautical miles and began walking them along the pencil line like a child might steer a toy. Three hundred nautical miles.

  He looked up at Isla and would have sworn again if she’d been wearing her headphones. With a good wind at their back and with constant work they might average eight knots, but Sam was still in shit shape. On top of that the engine was fouled meaning they couldn’t rely on the iron sail if the breeze dropped. He planned an average of five knots, which was still hopelessly optimistic, and reckoned it would take them the guts of three days. And that was just to hit land. Finding a berth could force them to the western side of the island – closer to their ultimate destination but an extra day with their uninvited crew.

  Sam was exhausted. The distance meant he would have to somehow teach the man to sail. Not an appealing prospect. He’d been through that language barrier before with Iraqi Special Forces and it had been painful. The only other option was to go south but that meant Egypt, Israel or Libya, and Sam had a chequered past with each. Anyway, his working assumption was that the migrant family had been escaping one of those places. He hadn’t the energy for a battle and something inside Sam suggested that the family’s risk ought to harvest at least some reward. To take them back would mean that their journey, and any lives lost, had been in vain. Plus, south was further from Ireland and at that moment he craved some stability for Isla. Her sadness at the suggestion of offloading the Muslim child had suddenly made him understand her loneliness. He settled on a course of two-nine-zero, climbed on deck, hoisted the sails and leaned into the breeze.

  “You sent the blood donor to the desert?” inquired the doctor, who possessed just enough professionalism to be concerned. “We took a lot of blood out of him. He’s not fit to drive – he’s not fit for anything.”

  “He is a fat oaf and he had enough blood for three men,” spat Tassels.

  The doctor hadn’t kept track of the quantities extracted from Big Suit but he knew it was pints. He was astonished that the larger policeman had even managed to walk to his car.

  “Call him,” said the doctor.

  “Suddenly you’re worried about someone’s health?” sneered his cousin.

  “He may run out of reception,” offered the doctor, clutching at straws but desperate to make sure the supply route didn’t close down. If Big Suit died, there would be no more boats and no European dream for a dodgy doctor.

  Tassels conceded, dialled the new number and held the handset to his ear. “What does it matter? If he runs into a few mad militants, it just means all the more for you and me.” Tassels’ leery smile revealed stained teeth, a stump and a gap.

  The doctor nodded back pretending to agree but was repelled by the exposure of his cousin’s rotten cavity.

  Tassels held up a hand. “Where are you? Forget Sharm,” he barked. “The rat is talking. Turn east towards Nuweiba.” Tassels looked up to the doctor, his raised hand paddling open in inquiry.

  “Ferry terminal,” gushed the doctor, recalling what he and Habid had agreed.

  “Ferry terminal,” repeated Tassels into the phone, before a long pause and some muted squawking. “Well, I’ve never been there either,” he said. “Just get there and call me when you arrive.” He pressed the red button and turned to his cousin with a smug look on his face. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The doctor nodded.

  In his bed in the cell Habid cracked a small smile at an extra layer of deviousness.

  Eight

  The man was an imbecile – that much was plain. He had plenty of physical strength and was fit, but he was thick. No matter how many times Sam showed him how to load a winch with a rope, clockwise, he made a bollocks of it, so Sam opted instead to show him how to helm. He stood at the wheel and coaxed the man to feel the list and drive of the boat, allowing her to drift too close to the wind and gesturing at the decline in the speed readout on the instrument panel before correcting the movement to the show an increase in the digital readout. No. No
concept and no understanding. Sam paused after a while and almost laughed at how ridiculous the situation had become. Here he was trying to teach an idiot in a woman’s outfit how to sail in a different language. Who was the fool, he wondered, him or me? The dynamic was confusing. The man had been smart enough to dress in a burka in the hope of securing rescue, yet couldn’t wrap a rope around a drum without direction.

  Sam settled for a watchman. With binoculars in hand and increasingly impatient gestures, he impressed upon his new crew the need to alert him when any vessel was spotted. Sam attempted to apprise him of what the blips on the radar meant but realised the man may never have even seen a television and gave it up as pointless. Irritable, he pushed on the autohelm and sought the sanity of Isla below.

  He found his daughter and the little girl stowed away in Isla’s cabin. It was a tight fit for adults but the kids had managed to make plenty of space and a small den out of sleeping bags. To Sam’s surprise he found them giggling merrily, taking teddies and dolls in and out, blethering away in noises rather than words, apparently understanding everything one another meant. Sam watched for a while delighted at Isla’s evident happiness and the other child’s apparent improvement. He boggled at their creativity – he could never offer the type of play this Arab child could, which fed his anxieties about how Isla would take their inevitable separation. Curious, he thought, how he could crave something that would upset the person he loved most. A reminder, perhaps, of how much he still had to learn.

  The mother was in the forward cabin. Sam could hear her. The sobbing. It stopped as soon as the creak in the floorboard betrayed the presence of another outside the door. He didn’t dare imagine what she’d been through. He didn’t feel required to – he’d been through enough himself. Then he felt the boat fall into an unnatural sway and he knew a gybe was coming. Cursing the eejit he’d left on deck, he made his way to find out what the man had done.

  Big Suit used the long drive to plan his next move. His 1987 Toyota Corolla possessed about as much grunt as a donkey, and a man of his intellect required time.