No sooner had Hifa finished putting out the lines than she was pulling two of them in again, mackerel wriggling on the end. I tried to take that as a good omen. She killed them and put the lines back out again. Then she wiped her hands on herself and came and sat next to me where I was putting the food stores back in the hidden compartment.
‘Plan?’ she said.
I shook my head. I said: ‘We’re drifting south-west, I think. Away from the Wall. But I’m guessing. I don’t really know where we are.’
‘The Captain’s plan was to head south. He said there were places where people would help us.’
‘He said he knew places – we don’t. Big difference.’
Hifa shrugged. I shrugged too. I can’t remember who spoke first and who agreed, but what we settled on was, south. Towards the places where the Others came from. It made sense: we were Others now.
For the next week we did a mixture of drifting and gentle rowing to correct our course. We had no compass so the navigation wasn’t rough and ready so much as rough and rougher. There were sharp ups and downs to our emotions, not just hour by hour but minute by minute. There were times when I could imagine finding settleable land, finding food, finding somewhere we could live peaceably for the rest of our lives, be happy, even live a kind of idyll, and other times when I came close to thinking the best thing would be just to get over the side of the lifeboat and swim away from it until my strength gave out and the end came. Hifa at times was affectionate, at times irritable, at times silent, and there were even times when we joked and laughed as much as when we were back in our private room in barracks on the Wall. We cuddled to keep warm and even had sex once or twice. Death and sex – close companions. We didn’t talk much about what had happened, and when we did, we were quick to absolve ourselves. There wasn’t much that we could have done that was any different, or would have made any difference. There were a lot of ways we could have got ourselves killed too.
We caught a few fish. We collected some rainwater. I think those supplies extended our probable survival time by about a week to ten days. I told Hifa I was trying not to think about it, but in truth I was running calculations all the time: how long we had left, how far we could drift or row, what were our odds. I thought we would be unlucky to head roughly south for a month and not come across land at any point, but I also had no illusions about just how unlucky it was possible to be. As Sarge would have pointed out, if we weren’t freakishly unlucky, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.
On the afternoon of the eighth day, I saw something on the horizon. I went through that usual sea-sequence of thinking something is a cloud, then suspecting/hoping it might not be, then the hope growing, then ecstatically letting yourself accept that hope is justified. The thing I could see was too square, too abrupt in its angles, to be a natural object. We were past caution, so we adjusted our direction and started rowing towards it, hard shifts of thirty minutes each. We were desperate to get there while it was light, because we knew that once darkness had fallen we might never find it again, whatever it was. We could drift away from it in the night as we had drifted away from the island. So it was now or never. My hands had grown unused to rowing when we were on the rafts, but the diving had helped me to get reasonably fit, and having a destination in sight made it easier too. We rowed for about three hours. As we came closer it became apparent that it was an oil or gas installation. From a distance there was no way of telling if it was inhabited or not. At closer and closer range, that was still true. There was nobody to be seen on deck and no sign of activity.
‘What if we can’t get up it?’ Hifa asked, while I was rowing. She was standing at the front of the boat, not looking at me but at the platform. She had read my mind, because once I realised what the platform was, I had begun to worry that there would be no means of getting off the lifeboat and onto the structure; that we would bump up against it as we almost had against the island, and find no way of climbing aboard. The disappointment of that could kill me.
‘It’s some sort of installation, there must be ways on and off it,’ I said, sounding, to my own ears anyway, a lot more confident than I felt. The platform was close now, so I rowed and kept rowing, but the currents here were adverse, and it was harder work than I had thought possible to close the last few hundred metres. At this range you couldn’t see how it worked. It was an oil or gas rig; I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t have known how to tell, the difference. The main deck was high, seventy metres or so above the water. There was a tower on the main deck. The whole structure was supported on four legs, which as we got closer could be seen to each have one thick main pillar and another smaller one attached to it.
Since the attack on the Wall, I had learnt to expect the worst. That was proving to be a useful habit. We came to the structure and manoeuvred alongside the nearest leg so that the currents would press us against it and it would take less work at the oars to hold us in place. There was no ladder there, but I didn’t panic. There were four main legs, each with an inner leg, so there were eight places where we might find a ladder. Eight chances. One down, seven to go. Hifa held the lifeboat in place with small movements of the oars, while I took a break to recover some strength. My arms were shaking and weak from the rowing. Once we moved from that spot, we would need enough muscular strength to row back to the structure against the currents. I took fifteen minutes to rest, then braced myself for the next thing. I guessed that we had half an hour of light left at the most and I had by now convinced myself that this was our last chance; if we didn’t find a ladder now it would be too dark and we would be too weak, and we wouldn’t be able to hold ourselves in place all night. We pushed off and I rowed while Hifa looked. It didn’t take long to check the inside legs. Then we took a turn around the outside, fighting hard not to drift too far from the platform and then fighting harder to row back to it.
No luck. There was no ladder, no handhold, no dangling ropes, nothing. No hope. Hifa didn’t say anything and nor did I. I rowed back to our starting position, panting, my arms burning, the taste of blood in the back of my throat. At that point, it might have made as much sense to let the current pull us away from the platform, to give up on the hope of it and let it go, but the sea was so big and we were so alone that it was impossible to leave a site where people had been, where human activity had made its mark, even if it offered nothing for us. The light was starting to fade now. I thought we might have enough rope to loop around one of the inner legs of the platform and tie us in place until the morning. Then we could decide what to do next.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Hifa. She pointed across the platform to one of the inner legs on the far side. ‘I don’t remember that being there ten minutes ago.’
I looked. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. A ladder was clearly visible. For a moment I doubted what I was seeing, then realised that it must be a retractable ladder and that somebody had extended it for us. That meant two things, two very important things, two things so important and so wonderful that I could hardly believe them: that we were not alone, and that somebody was making us welcome.
I was suddenly feeling a lot less tired. I pushed off and rowed across underneath the platform and we tied ourselves up to the ladder and then looked at each other to see who should go up first. Hifa nodded and took off her cap and shook out her hair, and set off. There was a small stage halfway up and I let her get to it before following her. I’m not great with heights and that thirty-five metres of ladder felt like a hell of a lot of ladder. My arms were jelly when I got to her.
‘I don’t know what to wish for,’ she said.
‘I know. Best just to wait and see.’
Hifa set off up the next stretch of ladder. This went all the way to the main deck. She passed through a circular hole at the top and I started up after her. I should have been boiling with thoughts about what was up there and what would happen next, but all I could think about was how I hated being so high up with nothing but a ladder to cling to.
I told myself not to look down, but told myself so insistently that it turned into a mantra, (don’t) look down look down look down. I got to the top and pulled myself through and lay on the metal main deck, trembling all over and gasping for breath. I don’t think I could have pulled myself up a single further rung of the ladder. But I didn’t have to. We had made it.
24
We were in a small alcove or entrance hallway at the top of the ladder. Hifa was sitting ten feet away, cross-legged, waiting for me. One third of the platform was open to the elements. At the edge, you could look down and see the sea. From where I collapsed on the floor, all I could see was cloud and the gathering dark. The other two thirds of the platform were taken up by the tower, with this alcove as the only entrance. The sides of the walls facing us were lined with sheet metal. The only way through the alcove into the tower was via a metal door.
When I got my breath back, I said, ‘No reception committee?’
She shook her head. ‘Just me. But we can’t go further. We’re locked out.’ I walked over to the door and tried the handle. It didn’t move. I tried to rattle the frame, but it stayed as still as concrete. The door wasn’t just locked but bolted. It had the solidity of an industrial piece of architecture; not the kind of door you can kick in, and from the outside, there was no lock to pick. There was no way through unless someone allowed us through. But it wasn’t all bad news. On the floor of the platform, next to the immovable door, were a plastic jug of water and a small paper bag. I opened the bag and did a double take at the contents: six power bars of the kind we had been given when we were on the Wall. I looked at Hifa, and she shrugged back at me.
‘Somebody making us welcome,’ she said. ‘Or sort-of-welcome. We’re being watched.’
‘You’d have thought so. Not sure who by, though.’
‘So now what?’
‘Let’s just sit here for a bit.’
So we did. It wasn’t as if we had much choice, that evening, after the day we had had. We sat on the platform and waited to get our strength back. The sun was right on the horizon now and the sky had cleared for dusk. The grey metal platform was flooded by incongruously beautiful evening light. It was good to feel that this night at least we would be dry and safe. When I stopped shaking, Hifa and I ate the power bars, slowly and deliberately. The very first bite was of dried red fruits, the same as the first one I had had on my first morning on the Wall. It gave me an overwhelming flashback: I was suddenly back there between Hifa and Shoona, aching with longing for the twelve hours to go past. It felt as if that was ten minutes ago; it felt as if that was two lifetimes ago.
When we had finished the power bars, it was dark. In the alcove next to the locked door, we were sheltered from the wind, and it wasn’t cold. We lay back against the corner of the metal walls. Hifa snuggled against me and we settled down for the night.
‘This is weird,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I was so tired I could hear myself slurring. ‘But good weird. Tomorrow we’ll find out.’ I didn’t say what we’d find out, because I didn’t know. But I felt sure we’d find something out. I fell asleep with Hifa’s head on my shoulder.
The next time I opened my eyes, we were lying the other way around, with my head on her shoulder, and it was bright day. The night had passed in a state more like unconsciousness than sleep. We must have been out cold for at least eight hours. Hifa was still out; I was so stiff I felt as if my bones would crack before my muscles would bend. My neck was cricked, my arms were both heavy and stinging, my right leg was cramping and my left leg had gone dead. Despite all that, I felt good. We were up here rather than out there. My intuition told me that we were safe; at a minimum, safer than we had been, and maybe much better than that. As slowly as I could, trying not to wake Hifa, I leant over and started to stretch and as I did so, turning my head, I saw something which made me feel even better: a fresh jug of water had been left out and, better still, in fact the best news ever, the door that had been bolted shut the night before was now ajar.
I got up and went to the edge of the ladder and looked down. I could see the end of our lifeboat, which meant it was still there tied up; good. For a few minutes I looked around the horizon. It was a clear day with little cloud and not much wind, and I could see a very long way; blue sky and blue-green sea and not a sign of boats or planes anywhere. Good. I shook Hifa awake, gently at first, and then more firmly.
She blinked, opened her eyes, took a moment to focus. I could see her putting together what had happened, where we were.
‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘Wow. What?’
I pointed at the door. Hifa jumped up, going from groggy and just-woken to fully alert in a split second. Then she exhaled and slowed herself down for a moment, and we looked at each other. And then we went through the alcove door into the tower.
The inside of the tower was, at first sight, hard to take in. The only light came in through slit-like windows high in the walls and, as we entered from the bright outdoors, it was initially difficult to see anything at all. I gradually took in an impression of what seemed to be complete chaos. The floor was covered in pipes and cables and metal boxes and wooden crates, many of them partly smashed. On the side of the room closest to the door, where we were standing, the debris was piled so high it was almost impassable. I didn’t trust myself to clamber over the obstacle course until I could see properly, so we stood there for a few minutes and tried to understand what we were seeing. Then we began pushing through the mess. We stepped over and between pipes and cables and metal boxes as we went. This, the ground floor of the installation’s tower, had evidently been some kind of control centre. The far side of the room had seven or eight computer monitors, all of them black and silent. There were stacks of computer equipment on the floor of the room’s far half. The sense of mess and abandon was absolute.
There was a metal ladder in the corner of the room, the same kind that we’d used to get up onto the platform, passing through a circular hole in the floor above. We slowly and carefully climbed up it, Hifa going first. On this upper floor, the second of the tower’s three storeys, the windows were bigger and it was much easier to see. And that is where we met our host. A pale, very thin man, wearing nothing but black drawstring trousers, was squatting in the far corner of the room. He was just this side of emaciated; you could see his ribs, which were heaving in and out; he was panting with what must have been excitement or fear. His face was covered in thick dark beard and the only part of it easily visible was his eyes, which were wide and startled. He could have been any age from thirty to sixty. He was sitting next to one of the windows. Beside him, resting with the end down on the floor, was a metre-long telescope. That was clearly how he had spotted us and monitored our approach. In front of him was a cardboard box. The box was resting on a small low table, like a footstool. The bottom of the box had been removed and it had been placed on its side so the cardboard looked like a proscenium arch. On the floor also were small torn fragments of paper, folded over so they could stand up.
‘Hello,’ said Hifa. She walked across to him and squatted down so that she was at the same level as he was. I followed her and did the same. ‘My name is Hifa and this is Kavanagh. Thank you very much for lowering the ladder for us. You saved our lives.’
The man said nothing but moved some of the pieces of paper around while looking at them through the box. My first thought: he’s lost his mind, he doesn’t know who he is or where he is or what he’s doing. But there was something about the game he was playing which seemed orderly and full of intent. The pieces of paper were just that, pieces of paper in different colours, but they had been carefully folded, and he now took all of them out of the box apart from one tall piece and a small flatter piece. He moved them around and then he picked other pieces of paper up and put them in the box and moved them around too. I watched him for a little while but there was no evident pattern to what he was doing. Hifa and I gave each other a quick look.
‘Do you mind if
we take a little tour?’ said Hifa. The man made no reply but his head twitched. It might have been an involuntary movement but we decided to take it as a yes. We straightened up from our squatting and, like the pirates on the floating community, set out to take an inventory. As on the lower floor, the whole of this level was one big room. It was divided into two halves; our new friend was in the tidier section, where there were a number of chairs and a table covered in papers, as well as his cardboard box and telescope.
The other half of the room was as chaotic as it had been downstairs: an obstacle course of boxes and crates and huge circular cans. Hifa and I moved over to check what was in them, giving frequent looks back at the man, who didn’t seem at all bothered by what we were doing – he had gone back to shuffling his bits of paper around inside the cardboard box. Some of the crates I recognised as food crates, of the same type that we had on the lifeboat. I tapped the sides of them as I passed; about half were empty, about a quarter were part full, about a quarter were completely full. I felt a surge of hope, of joy. One of the full crates had a partially open lid; I lifted it and looked inside. There was a lot of food here, really a lot. It didn’t matter how old the tins inside were, this stuff lasted forever. As for the big storage cans, they might be water or they might be oil, but it was hard to think of anything else they could be, and whether they were water or oil, it was the best imaginable news. Hifa and I looked a question at each other and decided that we would wait a little before we opened them to find out. We didn’t want to seem as if we were launching a hostile takeover. We had just got here and who knew what our host might be thinking.
The Wall Page 19
